Polaris Announce Highly Anticipated New Album, 'Fatalism'

Polaris are BACK with an Every Time I Die-tinged banger, Inhumane, the first single from their upcoming third album, Fatalism, due for release on Friday, 1 September via Resist/Sharptone.

An album shaped by despair and dystopia felt over the last years, Inhumane leads the charge with a gory and ambitious music video starring Void Of Vision's Jack Bergin and features a Tom Morello-esque guitar solo. Check out the clip below.

Drummer and songwriter Daniel Furnari said about the single, "Inhumane reflects on the feeling of growing desensitized to death, violence and tragedy due to overexposure. I think for a lot of people over the last few years, when you’re facing a constant barrage of horrible news coming from every corner on a literal daily basis, eventually, you reach a point where the initial shock and sadness wear off and you find yourself becoming almost numb to it. 

“It's like a subconscious defence mechanism - when caring too much becomes too taxing, we stop caring at all. That hollow feeling, or lack of feeling, can come with a lot of guilt, making you question whether your empathy and your humanity have been erased, and in a strange way almost wishing you could feel that pang of fear or sadness again."

Furnari added, "The music video for Inhumane, conceived by our director Ed Reiss, takes that concept to a fantastical extreme, and features us falling through the floors of a collapsing apartment building, to find that new horrors (literally) await us on each level...It’s one of the wackiest (and bloodiest) ideas we’ve ever put on screen and I’m still kind of in disbelief that it came together!"

Like many Australian acts, Polaris struggled with writing Fatalism after not being able to tour February 2020’s The Death Of Me (they went on a ten-year anniversary tour earlier this year, you can check out our review here). They connected over Zoom to write new music, but it wasn’t until the Covid-19 lockdowns eased and ended last year that the band trekked to the Blue Mountains for an intensive week of writing.

Polaris’ new album was recorded over a period of five months with the band and their live sound engineer, Lance Prenc (who also co-produced, mixed and mastered Fatalism), while vocal recording duties were handled by Alpha Wolf guitarist Scottie Simpson. 

“For us, fatalism is the resignation to the idea that you have no control over certain things, that some things are almost pre-determined and inevitable,” Furnari said, “which seems like a negative and almost fearful notion. But one of the reasons I was drawn to it as a concept and as an album title was that there’s almost a freedom in that idea too. Once you can accept that there are certain things you simply can’t control - it’s actually very liberating."

“We want people to feel a sense of connection to something outside of themselves when they hear this album. There’s a certain peace that comes with accepting that there are some things larger than yourself and redirecting that fear.”

You can pre-order Fatalism here.