Style: Trap, future bass, drumstep, progressive metal (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: RJ Pasin, very cool tutorials, Dante Swan, Mirar
Country: United States
Release date: 23 October 2026

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It’s my senior year of high school. Sunday School is finally over, and the unsavory teenagers I surround myself with are trying new ways to get fucked up in a Dodge Neon at the back of the church parking lot. It’s like a show and tell for ne’er-do-wells who have a vague understanding that there’s a TV show called Breaking Bad and yet are too sheltered by their Evangelist parents to actually understand what drugs are and how they work. One kid brought catnip and rolled it up with printer paper from the public library, another crushed up Smarties and put it in a ziploc bag, and a third has a bottle of Mountain Dew and keeps insisting you can “just snort it”. On the radio, a fuzzy rendition of some unlistenable dubstep comes on, and one of them turns to me and proudly proclaims that it’s “from the end of a YouTube video”. “Your mom lets you watch YouTube?” another kid asks.

Were it to come out in 2012, Polyphia’s Be Not Afraid would be a huge hit among the crowd of rebellious teenagers whose parents still force them to go to church on Sundays. The kids get the privilege of listening to obnoxious, blown-out drumstep mixed with prog metal guitars while the parents think it’s imparting good values with its tenuous-at-best Christian theming. Subtle mastermind and twink muppet Tim Henson never lets the listener forget that this is, allegedly, a Christian album, using Biblical references in track titles and placing religious samples throughout the record in a deliciously condescending manner. Musically, Be Not Afraid is an endless deluge of bass-blasted trap interspersed with effect-laden guitar noodling delivered in bouts that are legally not allowed to exceed the length of a TikTok.

Being a fan of texturally diverse and hyperactive acts like Trust Fund Ozu and Cocojoey, Polyphia’s use of crunchy percussive effects and noodly guitars was a tantalizing prospect. However, the execution of these elements on Be Not Afraid culminates in what can only be described as ‘fart music’. Henson is clearly enamored with the idea of scrambling the listener’s brain with ear-tickling sound effects, yet he takes absolutely no care in crafting these effects into engaging moments or even finding interesting ways to explore them. “They Know Not What They Do” delivers its obligatory sample over lightning-speed guitar picks, obnoxious enough to completely detract from whatever the hell the speaker is talking about. “With Eyes to See” is a particular low point, featuring laser guitars used for evil, some of the record’s most obnoxious sampling¹, and bass work that sounds like it was recorded from a car whose speakers were shredded from years of abuse. Admittedly, “J-Bomb” did perk my ears up, layering a slippery guitar lick with stop-and-go beats that morph in tempo, but Be Not Afraid as a whole shows that Henson’s textural acumen likely begins and ends with clipping his experiments into oblivion.

Be Not Afraid’s textural failures could absolutely be forgiven if their presence were in service of literally anything in the music. Instead, Henson and co. are insistent that they fill the runtime with as many ideas as possible and avoid any logical or narrative sense at all costs. The separation between tracks feels arbitrary at best: you could take all of the ideas presented on Be Not Afraid, rearrange the order with a random number generator, and end up with a virtually identical experience. “They Know Not What They Do” is the most irritating of the bunch, lavishing the listener with an acoustic aside and a flanged guitar buildup into an ear-bleeding drop that lasts for twenty seconds before turning on a dime back to acoustics. This track—and virtually all the others—refuse to engage with a point of view, aside from the lazily thrown-in samples that remind the thoughtless listener that this is, indeed, about Christianity in some deeply inscrutable way. “Can You Feel It” comes the closest to feeling like an actual piece of music, featuring a semblance of a chorus surrounded by a sea of unrelated nonsense; additionally, “Power in the Blood” manages to scramble onto a single riff to centralize its overblown bass boosts. While listening, you can enjoy some weird electronic blip at one moment and maybe a sleek guitar lick will catch your ear the next, but it literally could not matter less; give it fifteen seconds and it’ll be a distant memory.

As the Subway’s biggest fan of manic, chopped-and-screwed, genre-blending compositions, I should be the target audience for Be Not Afraid. Instead, what I got was a complete bastardization of the brilliance showcased by the hyperprog scene. Rotten textural exploration, ephemeral-at-best guitar licks, and a complete disregard for how its gaudy fragments could build into a single coherent thought render every “track” so infuriatingly aimless that Polyphia’s point of view—if there was any to begin with—gets drowned in a sea of biblically-accurate fart sounds. After finishing Be Not Afraid, I feel the last wisps of Sunday School lessons leave my brain as I try to snort Mountain Dew in the church parking lot, scrambling for a tissue to stop the nosebleed. I think I need better friends.

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Recommended tracks: Can You Feel It, J-Bomb, Power in the Blood
You may also like: Challenger Deep, Loam, Trust Fund Ozu
Final verdict: 3/10

Related links: Facebook | Instagram

Label: Rise Records

Polyphia is:
– Tim Henson: guitars
– Scott LePage: guitars
– Clay Gober: bass
– Clay Aeschliman: drums

1. This is to say nothing of “Screwtape”, which uses a sample of disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ infamous ‘turning the frogs gay’ rant. ↩︎