If you thought that Polyphia’s current album, Remember That You Will Die already featured enough guitar experimentation, then get ready to start prising open your mind to what they have planned next.
Speaking with guitarist Tim Henson at NAMM 2025, Guitar World went in deep with the unconventional virtuoso to find out what’s ahead and how they’re aiming to bring their hybrid musicality and shred to an even wider audience.
“It’s heavy,” Henson explained. “That’s exciting for us, and I think last year was really eye-opening for us in terms of how we should start composing for the live performance.”
And it seems such moves could involve a little less of the nylon-stringed wondery that has caught fans attention. Although claiming that he doesn’t want to “tone it down in the technicality department,” he does want to “make sure that it can work and just be executed really well.”
“Playing a nylon-string to 80,000 people is a little like… when you think of a nylon-string, you think of a dude in a coffee shop, right?” he explains. “So, it’s a little disconnect there. We’re excited to really hone that in and really make the music bigger for that kind of audience now,” and that would appear to point towards a whole new range of guitars purely to get the sound that they require.
Henson has teased the use of even more distortion, further extended-range models and even the as-yet-unannounced possibility of entirely new Ibanez signature guitars for launch alongside their next opus.
“[There’s] lots of eight-string. We’re playing baritones and stuff, too. We’re just making new guitars that don’t exist for the sole purpose of writing something really, really cool with it, so that if you want to learn it, you’re gonna have no choice but to buy that guitar!,” he jokes.
Or at least we think he’s joking…
Previously Henson had been seen rocking a new white colorway on both a six– and 8-string version of his Ibanez TOD builds, giving rise to speculation about the prospect of an even more, high-spec Prestige line coming soon.
Watch this space.
