Monolith launched on to the Australian festival circuit in 2022 to incredible success. Scenestr remarked, “If I’m asked if the festival was good – that’d be a big hell yes! Monolith’s Brisbane leg was a crushing success” whilst Wall of Sound commented that “Leaving Monolith on that high, felt like leaving a church service, where you were praising at the altar of prog-rock/metal”.
Monolith is thrilled to announce its triumphant return, bringing an unbeatable curation of international names and Australian favourites to venues around the country this November. The festival features Coheed & Cambria as headliners, with Periphery, Leprous, Intervals, Novelists and Silver Fang rounding out the bill. Alongside the incredible line-up will be workshops, panels, market stalls and DJ’s to further enhance the festival experience for Australian prog fans.
Each Saturday, HEAVY will profile one of the bands playing to bring you up to speed on what to expect, with today featuring Periphery.
Monolith tickets on sale here: https://www.destroyalllines.com/tours/monolith/
Rome wasn’t built in a day, the world has never been less predictable, and “djent” is not a genre. These are all undeniable truths that bind us together as we enter 2023. For genre-shifting GRAMMY® Award-nominated progressive metal quintet Periphery – Misha Mansoor [guitar, programming], Jake Bowen [guitar, programming], Matt Halpern [drums], Spencer Sotelo [vocals], and Mark Holcomb [guitar] – creating the ravenously awaited follow up to 2019’s critically-acclaimed Periphery IV: HAIL STAN [3DOT Recordings] was one of the most difficult experiences it has weathered to date. It was a process that very nearly broke the band.
However, with Periphery V: Djent is Not a Genre, Periphery returns with an album that was not only worth the wait, but sees the band nearing the pinnacle of its abilities.
“There were times where I didn’t know how this album would ever come out. I didn’t know how I’d ever feel good about the album, and I’d rather quit the band than put out an album that I don’t feel great about” Mansoor confesses. While Periphery IV took the band a year to write and record – a period that was considered incredibly long for the group at the time – the writing sessions for Periphery V began in earnest in the fall of 2020, making the gestation period for this release the longest in Periphery’s near 17 year history by far.
It was a process fraught with logistical issues stemming from the pandemic, but also challenged by the band’s increasingly high standards for themselves. Mark Holcomb explains, “We would do week-and-a-half writing retreats and then take two months away from the material before revisiting it together. We really played by the rules with respect to Covid safety and travel and because of that, we had an almost impractical amount of time to analyze the material between sessions. Our standards are higher than ever, so we all pushed ourselves on this album much harder than we ever have before. It was a hard process because we had to keep ourselves honest to those standards.”
Periphery V is certainly an album with a lot to process, but it’s one that ultimately feels like a cohesive and direct statement. Mansoor says “The time away between retreats allowed these things to be refined, which is something that’s become very, very important to us. If it isn’t serving the song, we got rid of it. It might have been one of the coolest riffs in a song, but if it wasn’t adding anything to the big picture, it got cut. We’re starting to get a lot more harsh about that and trying to take a much more holistic view of the music we make. I think that leads to this new level of refinement. That took a lot of time for us.”
The wait was long, the process arduous, but the results speak for themselves. Holcomb looks back and ruminates, saying “There were real life challenges this time and I don’t want to understate the impact that the pandemic has had on everybody. All of us in this band went through some life-changing shit. Things were fully primed to knock us off course, so it feels really good to look back and say ‘we got through this because of each other as a band – not because of any one person heroically saving the day.’ We got through it by just having faith in each other. We won the lottery in that sense with this band.”
Focus track Make Total Destroy.
