Every now and then, usually right around the time people are starting to feel like they’ve heard it all, an artist will come along and reinvent a sound or style in ways radically different to what came before, daring to dream and open up the floodgates for a new era of noise. These things can certainly be said of Polyphia – the Texan quartet led by Tim Henson and Scott LePage, whose combination of virtuoso guitar heroics and unabashed genre hopping has broadened their appeal to well beyond that of your average rock group. On latest album Remember That You Will Die, for example, they’re collaborating with the likes of Rodney Jerkins (Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga), Y2K (Doja Cat) and Johan Lenox (Kanye West) – borrowing as much from the pop and hip-hop worlds as they do from six or seven-string heroes, and in the process creating guitar music for non-guitar listeners.
“These days I view us more as composers rather than guitar players, though obviously that hasn’t always been the case,” says Tim Henson, who started the predominantly instrumental group with LePage in 2010 when he was 17 years old. Since then, he’s launched his own signature models through Ibanez and Archetype plug-in via Neural DSP. “I guess it’s been something we’ve been always working towards – composing rather than showing what to Tosin Abasi and he was like, ‘Ah, so this is your grown-up song!’ I was like, ‘We’re not children anymore!’”
