Metal's Mad Scientists

"It was just kind of a fun experiment really. The idea was just, 'Go all out and make any song that you want',” says guitar wizard Misha Mansoor of Clear; a release that isn't the band's next full-length album – work on that's planned for March/April – nor is it an EP – the band didn't want to repeat themselves having done Icarus back in 2011.

Mansoor doesn't refer to Clear as anything but an 'experiment' because the seven-track release is just that. There's an introductory song that the band did together, and then every other song saw the individual members of the six-piece write whatever they wanted.

Mansoor breaks down how it all came to be: “Stef [Stephen Carpenter] from the Deftones, I guess he's a pretty big fan of our music, and we'd hang out with those guys a lot, but with him especially, and one day when we were on tour together he suggested 'Y'know, you've got a band full of producers, I'd like to hear if you had an idea, how everybody would interpret that one idea'. And that stuck with us. It was a good point, and we started to wonder what that would be like. Then we had a little over a month between the Summer Slaughter tour and a headliner last year, and we realised that not only are we a band full of producers, but that a lot of us have the ability to record at home. So we could put together an idea like this fairly quickly when everybody was just responsible for one song.”

Where that idea diverged from the efforts of bands like KISS and The Melvins was that the person in charge of the song could do whatever they wanted to realise their vision. Where KISS had strict rules that they would not play on each other's records, Periphery decided any member could get whatever musicians they wanted to help them along with the thing, whether they were in the band or not.

“Everybody was like the 'director' of their own song. So they could get anybody's help on their song, whether they were in the band or not. It was about whatever they wanted to do to help fulfil their vision. In a regular Periphery song we'd all have our opinions and we'd have a discussion about stuff; here, if you were helping out somebody on their song it was just do what you're told.”

Despite the member overlap, the songs totally represent the individual visions of the writer. “Anybody who was helping anyone else with their song was there just to assist. And as much as they might be able to suggest things, like I said a few things and they weren't the way that we ended up going, but I didn't get butthurt because all I'm trying to do is help the person get to their vision of the song. So actually I think there would have been a lot more argument if it was something that Periphery were doing as a whole band. Because when you're representing a person, you can just try and assist them and no one would take it personally if they didn't like your ideas or whatever.

“It raises a lot more potential for problems than one might think. It brings up all these different issues about the dynamics in the band and communication and stuff like that. But everyone in the band had a similar vision of what this should be in terms of respect, and letting every other member do their own thing. Say I had ended up hating somebody's song, so be it. That's part of the risk going into it, and that has to be okay that it might end up like that. And I was expecting there to be that kind of reaction somewhere along the line, and I was mentally preparing for that, to be like 'There's probably going to be a couple of songs where I'm like this really shouldn't be on a Periphery release'. But I'm grateful to say I don't feel like that about any of the songs.”

With Clear just released, Periphery are now turning their sights towards an Australian run with Animals As Leaders, and Mansoor is undeniably stoked to get down here, if only to escape America's unusual and entirely inhospitable winter.

“It's pretty miserably cold in the US at the moment, so it's kind of good to get out of here. Though as I understand, you guys are in the middle of a heatwave? So we might just be going from one end of misery to the other.”