Polaris Release New Single and Video Featuring the Late Ryan Siew

July 27, 2023

Sydney band Polaris have returned with a new single called ‘Nightmare’, taken from their forthcoming album called Fatalism which will be out Friday, 1st September. ‘Nightmare’ comes accompanied by a video that the band created with friend Ben Wrigley – the video is the second of three videos the band filmed earlier in the year with guitarist Ryan Siew, who passed away at the end of June, aged 26.

“It has been a challenging and very emotional task to complete these videos in light of what has happened, but after careful discussion with his family we collectively felt that we wanted to share with the world the final things that Ryan created with us,” the band’s Daniel Furnari wrote in a statement. “We will proudly cherish the memories of him contained in this footage, and hope you will too.”

Polaris: ‘Nightmare’

Speaking further on the song, the band says ‘Nightmare’ is a reflection of the “constant state of fear” that the world is living in.

“The feeling of waking up every day into a dystopia of uncertainty and anxiety where nothing really feels safe anymore,” says Furnari. “The more I thought about it, the more I arrived at the conclusion that maybe this fear was the biggest thing we all had in common during a time of such great division – that our collective dread was our greatest unifier. That concept then really helped to shape the thematic direction of the rest of the record.”

‘Nightmare’ was the second song written for Fatalism, Furnari explains. “It started with that chorus melody, chords and lyrics, which I brought to the guys to build a song around. We fleshed it out on our first writing trip to the mountains and it developed into a very riff-heavy song, with the guitar being passed back and forth a lot between Rick and Ryan and all of us weighing in, so I think we all had an early attachment to it for that reason.”

The band will head out on tour throughout September in support of the record. The band announced they’d be continuing with the tour and album plans last week.

“This is the last set of complete songs that we wrote together with Ryan, and though the circumstances of their release are now framed by this tragedy, the meaning of the songs and the love we have for them has not changed,” the band wrote on Facebook. “We are incredibly proud of this record and looking forward to sharing it with you, and now more than ever we hope that you connect with it.”