Returning this year with one of the band’s most compelling albums since their inception, Periphery are set to level their past with the absolutely brilliant Select Difficulty. Known for their near faultless live performances, we caught the band at their Encore Stage slot delivering the goods with pin point accuracy. Fortunately we were able to speak to guitarist and one sixth of the musical entity that is Periphery, Jake Bowen. Illuminating what is to be expected on the new album, the bands inner workings and how after releasing their double album coup Juggernaut the band are straight back at it once again with their brand new album.

Today I have with me Jake Bowen of Periphery fame. How are you?

I’m great how are you?

Good man!

What was it like on the other side of the coin performing at Download?

It was awesome, I mentioned to a few other people today that I really, really appreciate that people are like partying in the mud and that they’ll watch our set and be filthy. That takes a lot of dedication and it takes a severe love for music and it was cool, it was a packed crowd.

What about P3, its coming out on the 22nd of July, how come you guys have written another record that quickly?

Thats a good question! I don’t know. No I do! We’re all writers and producers in our own right so we’re just constantly recording things on our own and just noodling around on guitars and just remembering all of these riffs. It hadn’t even been a year since Juggernaut, our last album came out and we’re already just like well we have all this motion why don’t we record something? It’ll be fun! We’re all off anyways, we weren’t touring so we figured that it might be a fun thing to do and it came together so naturally and so easily. It was just the right vibe for it, its kind of like one of those things that when its time, you know it. We kind of just rolled with it.

Did you record it with Nolly again?

Yep, Nolly is our in house Bass player, engineer, producer, best friend.

Everything.

Its another good fun thing about being in Periphery, you know we have somebody like Nolly, we have somebody like Misha, I know how to record, Mark knows how to record… Everybody is just really good at so it makes it really easy.

I was going to say one thing that a lot of people have said to me in the past is that the sound quality of Periphery’s records is really top notch. Do you think thats because all of you have a various different background in producing?

I think that we all have an ear for quality I think that the actual sound and the production is really up to Misha and Nolly. Because they value our opinions, because we do have the similar ear that they have they always bounce their ideas off of us and its a lot of back and forth of sharing, a collective of influence and quality control. I just think that it happens naturally despite who we are.

“The Price Is Wrong” is the heaviest song I have heard ever.

Hehe cool!

Is that kind of a direction that you guys are going to go in with P3 or is it going to be different?

There are some heavy songs! It wasn’t our intention to make a heavy album but there are some heavy songs on there. There’s a lot of melodic and progressive type stuff on there too its a very varied album in terms of sound but the thing that I really like about Periphery and one of the reasons I wanted to be in this band with these guys is that there is no direction that we choose. Its just kind of like we write what we feel and then we let it take us where the music takes us. We’re not trying to be a certain level of heaviness, we don’t get an album and once we have a bunch of songs and think “Well we need to have the ballad, the heavy song here and then have a really nice interlude here…” Whatever we write we arrange it and then that becomes our album.

Are there going to be longer songs? On Omega there were a couple of songs like “Stranger Things” was a bit longer…

There’s a few like longish ones but nothing like Omega or like “Racecar” which is fifteen minutes long. The thing about long songs is that they can become very gratuitious. If you want to write a long song it really has to happen naturally and organically. Those songs that I mentioned did happen that way, nothing worked out that way for this album but its not to say that we won’t do longer songs, it just didn’t work out this way.

Having three guitarists in a band do you guys fight over solos?

No, no! I actually don’t have any solos on this record. There was just no room for it, even the solos that are on there. They weren’t written until the very end because we thought that Spencer would sing over all of these parts but then Spencer was like “Well I think there would be a good guitar solo here and a good guitar solo here.” There’s only two spots and theres three guitar players so I like Misha and Mark fight over it. I get a break this album! The solos are very stressful for all of us, when you’re playing them live, like I mentioned we have this ear for quality control and thats a very stressful environment being up there and thinking “I better nail this solo or everyone is going to think I am shitty guitar player!”. The thing that is nice is that we all contributed to the songs, every song has a riff from each guitar player, its very balanced.

Probably a question you have been asked a thousand times, how did the name Periphery come about?

I think that Misha came up with it in 2004 – 2005, this was before he had any band members and I think he saw it on a billboard or something like that and thought that it was a cool name or something. I think thats the story, I ask him every couple of years and then I forget haha! For those who don’t know the periphery is the outer boundary of something.

I always thought that it had to do with your peripheral vision.

Yeah, I mean when you think about how that is phrased its kind of like the outer boundary of your vision.

Is there going to be an overarching concept with P3 or is it more individual songs?

Every song has its own identity, there is a motif that runs through the album that you’ll hear and it rears its head a little bit probably a third of the way through the album then you hear this big, epic version of it and then it comes back on the very last song. Its beautiful, its a beautiful melody but thats really the only thing that is like that.

I know with Juggernaut it starts off with “A Black Minute” which ties directly into the final bit of “Stranger Things”.

Yep!

Do you always try and make things cyclical?

Sometimes! We wanted to do a lot of thematics and motifs on Juggernaut because we knew that we were telling a story and we wanted the melodies to correspond with the various parts of the album. When you hear a motif come back its referencing a part of the story as well.

We’re using the music to tell a story and the story is composing the music kind of like this back and forth. It’s never intentional we just like doing it because its fun to reinterpret melodies, rhythms or lyrics or whatever just to fit in another song because its cool to go back and you really get the mileage out of the stuff that you compose. When you compose music it doesn’t just have to be that one way. You can do it in so many different ways so why not really show what you can do, the depth of music, so thats kind of not something that we do deliberately but its just something that we play around with.

Its like a little Easter egg..

Yeah, exactly!

You guys have a reputation for being nuts.

We’re all batshit crazy.

I’ve seen when people are hanging out and stuff you guys are pretty crazy, Instagrams, Face Swapping and Laughing without smiling thats one of the funniest things I have ever seen but how do you guys turn that off. The second that you hit the stage its just BAM straight into the music.

I mean we can’t do it all the time. When I’m not on tour I don’t act like that, I’m just like hanging out with my dog and playing with my dog. My friends at home don’t really act like that either its just like when Periphery is together, we’ve known each other for so long, we’re best friends, we just get like that. Because we’re so comfortable with each other it just happens so its like an on and off switch but we just have to be on tour or travelling with each other then eventually the demetia sets in.

Space dementia!

Yeah haha

To finish up what has been a record that you have been listening to over the last six months to a year?

You see I’ve actually stopped really listening to records. I got a premium Spotify account, I know this is like blasphemy for a lot of artists, they think that Spotify is the devil because they don’t pay a good royalty rate. Honestly, I use the discover weekly playlist and it tracks my listening habits and every Monday morning I wake up and I have a new populated list of amazing electronic music that I am really into.

I’ve just been saving every song to my Spotify account I just have this really eclectic, wide range of electronic music. I really couldn’t even name a bunch of artists but I just know that certain songs from artists that I just kind of make my own playlists to. Its kind like the new way that I have been consuming music rather than just buying an album and listening to the album format. Maybe I’ll go back to it, I’m sorry to say but a lot of Metal bands have been fucking up, I’m not interested anymore. I’m just kind of like the old codger that just doesn’t like music anymore, I’m a jerk!

Periphery’s brand new album Periphery III : Select Difficulty is set for a July 22nd release via Century Media Records.