On Remember That You Will Die, instrumental prog-rock’s resident devils achieve startling new levels of intricacy and wow-factor mayhem. Below, Polyphia’s Tim Henson and Scott LePage talk gear, practicing, their Steve Vai collab — and the album with the feel-good title of the year
BY JOE BOSSO. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN SCANLON
Provocateurs
AGITATORS. MERRY PRANKSTERS. TIM HENSON AND SCOTT LePage,the diabolical guitar duo and main drivers of the Dallas-based progressive band Polyphia, own up to all of it. Over the course of the group’s 12-year career, the two ax wizards have delighted in busting balls and messing with their fans’ heads (who can forget the band’s aptly titled 2017 EP, The Most Hated, on which the celebrated virtuosos purposely featured nary a lick of fretboard theatrics?), and in preparation for the release of their new album, Remember That You Will Die — their first studio offering since 2018’s New Levels New Devils — they came up with their most devious plan yet: the grand fake-out.
“First, we made everybody wait a really long time,” Henson says. “We teased that we had a new album in 2019, and then we kept teasing it. Pretty soon, people started joking that the new album didn’t really exist, so we went with it. We even made some merch that said, ‘The new album is a myth.’ We wiped all of our socials clean, and everybody went crazy.” He laughs. “That’s when we dropped the song ‘Playing God’ on them.”
As a preview of the new album, “Playing God” caused fans to flinch at first. Featuring Henson and LePage blitzing merrily on nylon-string guitars (in this case, custom-made, soundhole-less Ibanez Talman nylon-string models), the track was a wildly entertaining sonic and stylistic mélange of flamenco, bossa nova and trap. It marked the first time the two musicians played nylon-string guitars on record, but judging from their acrobatic and deeply soulful leads, along with their impossibly cool and casual badassery, one might easily assume they’d been born with the instruments in their hands.
At the time of this writing, the sumptuous video for the track (“We filmed it in the booziest mansion we could find,” cracks Henson) has racked up nearly 10 million views on YouTube — clearly, the mad genius behind the band’s anti-marketing tactics delivers results. “I guess the people missed us after all,” LePage jokes.
Henson and LePage’s penchant for hubris has been well documented. In a 2019 interview with Guitar World, Henson pulled no punches: “I think we’re great. If I were a kid, we would be my favorite band. That’s how cool our music is.” Reminded of his comments,
