Polaris Unveil Powerful New Single 'Nightmare'

Polaris are back with the confronting new track, Nightmare, which finds vocalists Jamie Halls and Jake Steinhauser exchanging lines about living in a “pre-apocalyptic wasteland”.

With a music video that captures the song’s ominous yet essential call to action to escape living in a dystopian kind of hell.

“We created this video with our friend Ben Wrigley, AKA Third Eye Visuals, who found some amazing locations and imagery to help us convey the track when paired with his brilliant editing skills,” drummer and lyricist Daniel Furnari said in a statement.

Also revealing that Polaris were paying tribute to guitarist Ryan Siew, who tragically passed away last month, Furnari added, “This was the second of three music videos we filmed with Ryan earlier this year.

“It has been a challenging and very emotional task to complete these videos in light of what has happened, but after careful discussion with his family, we collectively felt that we wanted to share with the world the final things that Ryan created with us. We will proudly cherish the memories of him contained in this footage and hope you will too.”

Siew stands out with an immediately unforgettable lead riff with finger-tapping action that sounds sick later in the track. The combination of screaming and singing also works a treat, and Furnari simply owns on the drums.

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Polaris wrote Nightmare during a 2022 writing session in the Blue Mountains; it was the second song written for their upcoming album, Fatalism, out on 1 September.

“Nightmare is a reflection on the constant state of fear that the world at large seems to have lived in for much of the past couple of years - the feeling of waking up every day into a dystopia of uncertainty and anxiety where nothing really feels safe anymore,” Furnari said.

He continued to say that with the more thought he gave, he realised that “the biggest thing we all had in common during a time of such great division” was collective dread, which he named “our greatest unifier”. “That concept then really helped to shape the thematic direction of the rest of the record.

“It [Nightmare] started with that chorus melody, chords and lyrics, which I brought to the guys to build a song around,” Furnari added. “We fleshed it out on our first writing trip to the mountains, and it developed into a very riff-heavy song, with the guitar being passed back and forth a lot between Rick [Schneider, guitar] and Ryan and all of us weighing in, so I think we all had an early attachment to it for that reason.”

You can check out the music video below.

Just days after the album is released, Australian fans will have the opportunity to hear album tracks for the first time in the biggest Australian venues they’ve ever performed in alongside international heavy-hitters August Burns Red, Kublai Khan TX and Currents. You can pre-order Fatalism here.