“WE HAVE THREE GUITARISTS BECAUSE WE CAN'T HAVE FOUR!"

Inside the new album from Periphery, where progressive metal meets smooth jazz - with wacky tunings,  ridiculous solos and more...

- Eillie Rogers 

Periphery’s trio of guitarists – Misha Mansoor, Jake Bowen and Mark Holcomb – have been blazing trails and melting faces together since Holcomb joined the band back in 2011. “The big joke back in the day,” Misha recalls, “was that the reason we have three guitarists was because we can’t have four!”

Over the years, their distinct musical personalities, exemplary technical abilities and unwaveringly high creative standards have propelled the band to progressively more innovative territories with each album. But following the release of the critically-acclaimed Periphery IV: Hail Stan in 2019, the usually prolific outfit hit something of a wall for the first time in their history. They’d teased fans with the promise of fresh material as early as March of 2021 with a (since deleted) Instagram post using the following hashtags: #periphery #djent #newalbum. But, as the months wore on, speculative online excitement teetered towards impatience as progress on Periphery V seemed to grind to a halt.

In the meantime, Misha and Mark released new music under their Haunted Shores moniker with 2022’s Void LP, and Misha also unleashed a tsunami of tracks from the Bulb archives, and Jake channelled his creativity into electronic solo effort, The Daily Sun.