'It's Been Just As Surprising For Us': Even Polaris Are Blown Away By Their Success

It's January 2018 and Polaris are special guests on Parkway Drive's Horizons anniversary trek around Australia. There's already sizeable fanfare surrounding the Sydney metalcore act, who were the buzz band of Australian heavy music following 2017's debut full-length The Mortal Coil. The passionate singalongs and rabid exchange of energy between the band and their faithful at Sydney's Metro Theatre reiterates that Polaris have arrived, and already outgrown support band status.

Fast-forward two years and The Music is conversing with lead singer Jamie Hails, as the band prepare to issue The Death Of Me. He's still recovering from a “bloody insane” set at UNIFY Gathering, which seems as appropriate a time as any to take stock of their rapid rise. “It's been a bit of a rollercoaster, and every tour and show we've played and have been playing just keeps getting bigger,” Hails reflects. “The reactions at all these shows, the responses are getting bigger, better and louder. It's been really awesome to see, and it's taken us by surprise. We never thought we would be doing the things that we have been doing, and the things that we've accomplished we never thought were going to be a thing for us. Here we are a couple of years later and we've already accomplished so much in such a short amount of time.

“There's a lot of moments where we take a step back and [are] just like, 'Wow, look what we've done, and look at what we're still doing and pushing to be doing.' We've been enjoying the rollercoaster while it's going, but [we're] also pushing it to keep seeing how far we can go, how high we can go, how far can we push this band.”

Given how swiftly Polaris, who formed in 2012, were seemingly elevated to being an upper-tier act in Australia, we question whether the frontman detected any resentment from other groups who had perhaps been around the traps for longer, but not enjoyed similar rewards. “To my knowledge, I don't believe so,” the singer says. “No one's ever really said anything in that way negative to our faces or anything. So I don't really know if there has been anything behind the scenes or behind closed doors that we don't know about.

“The best way I can say it is that it's been just as surprising for us as it has been for everyone else. We've just been five dudes from the Sutherland Shire and South Sydney, just writing music that we want to hear and we think sounds cool... The success we have had and are still having has been absolutely amazing, and I wouldn't take any of it for granted.

“I don't feel that we're doing anything different to what other bands have done. Our style of music, let's be honest, is metalcore. I feel that we're in a genre of music that has been looked at [as] kind of done and dusted thousands of times over the years. But for some reason, people seem to be viewing us as a very fresh, new kind of wave of that kind of style of music, which is awesome, because it's working and it's going well for us.”

After the international acclaim of The Mortal Coil and its accompanying world-conquering gigging cycle, the stakes are high for the follow-up. That level of expectation was made more problematic by tight deadlines to complete the new LP. “We were having such a busy touring schedule that writing and recording the record were pretty much sandwiched in between a lot of different tours. When the time we had allocated to get the record recorded wasn't [enough to have it] finished in that time, then there was a lot of stress beyond that to finish writing the record while we were on tour, and then come back home and record it in the very little time that we were home. So that didn't help at all, and added a lot more stress and pressure.

“But I'm very happy to be on the other side of it with the finished product, and proud of the product that we have. I'm proud of us as humans, and friends, that we went through what we went through. It was hard, it was rough, and it made us better people at the end of the day, coming out on the other side.”

The Death Of Me flaunts the anthemic hooks and beefy breakdowns devotees embraced on the band's debut, while also delving into more melodic territory at times. Hails admits that musically he's not “anywhere near as involved as what all the other guys are”, but did help shape the end result. 

“We've been so busy touring that I've pretty much just been trying to work to be able to pay rent when we're on tour. I've been writing when I can be of evenings. I guess with vocals, Dan [Furnari, drums] and Jake [Steinhauser, bassist/vocalist] meet up a lot to be able to talk over song direction, lyrical meaning and everything, and then I'm involved when I can be as well between all that. Then we do vocal pre-production days to try and work out the kinds of sounds that I want to be making to best convey the message of each song.”

The majority of the members have day jobs while not on the road with Hails working in a factory, “driving a forklift, running machines, packing boxes”. Their ambitious touring plans for 2020, including Australia, Europe, the UK and a festival appearance in Indonesia, will ensure less time for such endeavours.

Does the frontman look forward to being able to ditch the day job and pursue music as a fully fledged occupation? “Yeah. The band is becoming a lot more of a full-time thing. A lot of times when I should have been, wanted to be writing, I decided to work to be able to pay for rent, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to tour.

“We want to push to tour as many places as we can that we haven't been to before. But also keep returning to the places we have been, because the way you're going to grow is to keep hitting back the places you have been, and ideally have new people coming out each time you go back.”