Misha Mansoor, Jake Bowen and Mark Holcomb on how they lost sleep and cast aside some of the best riffs they’ve ever written to make Periphery V “as awesome as possible”

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, Misha unleashed a tsunami of tracks from the Bulb archives, and Jake channelled his creativity into electronic solo effort, The Daily Sun.

Concurrently, increased levels of self-criticism, geographical separation, exhaustion, false starts and time constraints all featured on the extensive list of challenges that were to be overcome if ambitions for a new Periphery record were to become reality. As Misha puts it: “We’ve written a lot of stuff and the bar gets raised. We’d like to elevate that every time. I was very personally proud of Periphery IV, so much so that I didn’t know how we were going to beat that.”

A mantra that “good was not good enough” led to a period of brutal material scrappage, which Mark describes as “a big setback” and “pretty demoralising from a personal standpoint” during the album’s early stages. 

But, testament to a determined process, as well as a solid-as-a-rock friendship that underpins contemporary guitar music’s most revered threesome, the prog-metal titans have emerged with an album that is not only worth the wait, but which doubles as the ultimate put-down to pundits who have never quite “got” the complexity of the band’s ambitious sound. Cue Periphery V: Djent Is Not A Genre, out now via the band’s own 3DOT Recordings label. 

With a wry smile, Misha professes to having had “a very tongue-in-cheek relationship” with the term that has beleaguered the band since the early days, and which has become something of a catch-all descriptor for seven- or eight-string progressive metal in general.

“It’s just a way to categorise, but we’re going to have some fun, too,” he laughs – and anyone who has been following the band for some time may recall that they’ve been doing just that since 2011’s playfully titled League Of Extraordinary Djentlemen Tour.

But the new album takes a hammer to more critic-bestowed categorisations than even its titular witticism suggests. “We don’t approach things like we’re going to write a certain style of music,” Jake says. “We’ll start with a riff or section and that will inform what happens in the song, and if we take it to a new territory that’s just because that’s what the song needs.”

As such, the album packs as many twists and turns as a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel as it blazes through brutal riffage and smooth jazz on Wildfire through to the dextrous open-tuned mastery of Wax Wings and the eardrum-pummeller that is Everything Is Fine! 

The electro-pop track Silhouette serves as a palette cleanser at the album’s midway point, before things get loud again with Zagreus and the bowel-busting eight-string chug of Dracul Gras – aka “Fat Dracula”. The album closes out in suitably epic style with Thanks Nobuo, 11 minutes of effects-laden drop-C inventiveness.

The most explicitly experimental excursion – when the tectonic plates of metal and jazz rub together on Wildfire – is something that Jake credits to “sleep deprivation on Misha’s part”. But Misha has a few words in defence of this methodology. 

“Being up late seems to switch off your prefrontal cortex and just lets the other parts of your brain operate,” he explains. “You’ll just approach things in a different way when you get loopy and you’re overtired. It doesn’t always work, but I have found that there have been some very strong post-2am ideas that have ended up as memorable Periphery sections.” 

He says that initially he had worried the segment would be cut in the cold light of morning. Instead, it became what Mark describes as “the first real complete idea for Periphery V,” and a “pillar song,” that stood strong, while many other technically impressive ideas ended up on the burn pile. 

As Misha says, “Mark wrote some of the most insane riffs I’ve ever heard and they straight up just got cut. If you heard these in a vacuum, guitarists would be like, ‘Why did you cut that? That’s incredible!’ But, really, it didn’t do anything for the song.”

Far from causing arguments or bruised egos, such seemingly harsh decisions reinforced a shared goal. “We’re trying to make the song as awesome as possible, as concisely as possible,” Misha adds.

A Holcomb special that did make the cut came in the form of the fleet-fingered Wax Wings, which he devised after finding fresh inspiration in the “wacky tuning” of D F# A E A C#.          

“It sounds like something you’d hear someone like Mike Dawes play,” he says. “It’s a very pretty tuning and it’s also hard to make it not sound pretty. Sometimes the pitfall with these things – and we ran into this with Scarlet from Periphery II as well – is that it’s hard to have a riff have a different sort of vibe and energy, and to have it switch from this pretty, open, flowery riff to building tension.”

Testament to the power of their three-brains-are-better-than-one ethos, it was through collaboration that Wax Wings became the album highlight that it is. “Jake contributed this awesome ending section that seemed to change the momentum of that song, and Misha added a bunch of really awesome riffs,” Mark recalls. “I’m proud of what it symbolises as far as our working culture.” 

Adds Jake: “It’s a hallmark of all of us coming together and there’s a lot of love from each member in this song.” He is also quick to champion the ”ridiculous solo” that Mark composed in a tuning that he jokes: “none of us have any business playing in.”

“It took me about three days to mock up any semblance of licks that made sense,” explains Mark, who had to re-visualise the fretboard after relinquishing all the familiar landmarks of standard tuning – or indeed any other Periphery staples such as drop C (C G C F A D) when using six-string guitars, or drop Ab (Ab Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb) when using seven-strings.

“Jake was in the room and helped me map out a couple of cool patterns, but it was like learning to play the guitar over again because none of the relationships between strings made any sense anymore. You have to recreate a vocabulary.” 

The exacting demands of each song, each tuning and each player’s individual preferences has long necessitated the need for bespoke gear, and Misha, Mark and Jake have been flying the flags respectively for Jackson, PRS and Ibanez for almost a decade – each with an ever-growing range of signature guitars to their name. 

For the album, Jake played his new Ibanez JBM9999, which pays homage to the arched top body style and double-cut aesthetic of the Ibanez RGA, which he says he’s “always kind of had a thing for,” but with the addition of his all new DiMarzio Mirage pickups.

Despite what appears to be an HS configuration, the guitar has a standard-sized ceramic humbucker in the bridge and a single-coil-sized humbucker in the neck, giving Jake a wide range of tones – from warm to full sear. With 27 frets, a set of Gotoh locking tuners, and Luminlay side dots, it’s a bright blue shredding machine. 

The album writing process also gave Mark the opportunity to workshop his latest PRS SE six-string signature guitar, which was released earlier this year. Simultaneously, he prototyped his new Seymour Duncan Scarlet and Scourge humbuckers, which have now usurped his long-favoured signature Alpha and Omega pair. “

The Scourge is a bridge pickup that has Alnico 8 magnets,” he explains. “I used to use ceramic for the Omega bridge pickups that I’ve been using for almost a decade, but I switched to Alnico 8, which I really loved, and we revoiced the pickups. It was cool to learn about what I was liking in the new iterations of the gear as the album went on.”

Possibly the owner of the most expansive collection of all, Misha reels off a list of “regular heavy hitters” that lent their tones to the record, including his Daphne Blue Jackson USA Juggernaut HT 7, which he had retrofitted with an EverTune bridge, and his extremely limited-edition HT 8 – a guitar he describes as having “so much mojo”, as epitomised by the dark and chewy eight-string tones of Dracul Gras. 

To complete the holy trinity of Misha Mansoor signature Jacksons, he also used his Laguna Burst six-string model, fitted with Bare Knuckle Juggernaut humbuckers. “This is kind of going all-out if money were no object how I’d spec a guitar,” he enthuses. “It’s a fantastic instrument.”

In the department of less likely suspects, Misha’s new(ish) signature Jackson MJ Series So-Cal PT also made an appearance. Openly described by its creator as a “sleeper Strat”, it more than pays tribute to the classic Fender aesthetic, swerving legal hot water by virtue of Jackson having been adopted into the Fender family of brands two decades ago. 

“It looks just like a regular HSS Strat,” he says, “but it sort of plays like my signature guitars because it’s got a roasted maple neck, a 20-inch radius, jumbo stainless steel frets, and Gotoh locking tuners.” 

Also boasting a “fairly aggressive” Bare Knuckle Ragnarok humbucker and “EQ-appropriate” Bare Knuckle Trilogy Suite single coils, the versatile guitar is more than capable of unleashing its vicious potential when required. “It doesn’t look the part, and I love how you can get away with that,” he smiles.

Mark’s latest PRS also leans less towards the brutal side of life, and more towards a classic feel that could find applications across a broad cross-section of styles.

“One thing that you can count on with us being old farts, and becoming older farts every year, is that we fall more in love with Strats and Teles,” he laughs.

“It’s funny how we started out with traditional gear,” Misha says, “and then the Axe-Fx came out and revolutionised everything, and then we started to find a love for analogue gear again. I’m using this EP-2 Echoplex from the ’60s or ’70s on a bunch of recordings, and now we’re sort of in the middle ground where we appreciate the digital, we appreciate the analogue and we use it appropriately.”

They cite Djent Is Not A Genre as being “the first Periphery record where there’s a bunch of amps,” with a Peavey Invective and an Omega Granophyre getting heavy combined usage throughout. Others that made the cut included a Carstens Grace, a Mesa/Boogie Lone Star for cleans and a lightly modded EVH 5150. 

Re-amping DIs also played a huge role in the recording process, with many early demo take DIs making it all the way through to final song iterations. “This is actually something we did with intent,” says Misha, who steered the entire process at his apartment studio.

“I pushed these guys and myself to try to get our takes to be as good as possible so we wouldn’t have to go about re-recording them. They’re not perfect, and I think it gives it more character. That just got re-amped to make it sound the way that we wanted.”

Another secret weapon for Periphery’s characteristically destructive tones is the Horizon Devices Precision Drive – a unit designed by Misha himself after a decade of experimenting with other overdrive pedals. “Unless it’s a clean channel that’s pristine clean, that is on all the time,” he stresses. “Just like Meshuggah!”

• Periphery V: Djent Is Not a Genre is out now via 3Dot Recordings.