Aussie heavyweights Polaris gear up for Froth and Fury festival

Australian metalcore band Polaris is set to headline the inaugural Froth and Fury festival in Perth and Adelaide, marking an exciting start to their year with two major festival performances. Fresh from career-defining moments like playing Rock Am Ring in Germany, the band continue their global ascent with upcoming North American dates, supporting Electric Callboy, and European shows with I Prevail. Polaris play Froth and Fury festival at Perth HPC on Saturday, January 24, with tickets on sale now. KAREN LOWE spoke to frontman Jamie Hails about the upcoming shows, playing at Rock Am Ring, meeting fans, and the WA band he’d love to collab with.

You guys are headlining the inaugural festival, Froth and Fury, in Perth and Adelaide. Are you looking forward to the shows? And if you could pick one festival to bring back, what would that be and why?

Yes, definitely looking forward to these festivals. We always love playing a festival, and to be headlining these two shows is pretty damn awesome. And to kick the year off with playing two festivals too is pretty cool for us as well. We’re very much looking forward to hitting the ground running.

What festival would I like to bring back? I mean… Soundwave? I never actually went to a Big Day Out, and I have a lot of friends that went to many Big Day Outs over the years, and it seems like I missed out, so I’d say maybe Big Day Out.

Yeah, you definitely missed out on Big Day Out!

Yeah, I feel like Good Things has kind of filled that space for what I believe Big Day Out was providing. Big Day Out was kind of like a wide range of music genres, not just straight-up heavy or alternative.

You guys are also about to tour North America with Electric Callboy and then Europe with I Prevail. What places in both continents are you looking forward to playing?  And are there any places you are nervous about? 

One that jumps to mind straight away is on the Electric Cool Tour. Firstly, I’m looking forward to doing this tour in general because they are such a fun band. They put on an incredible live show, and just from the past month or couple of months of them starting this world tour, the shows look insane, and I’m just excited to be able to witness this night after night after night.

Not only that, but some of the venues that we’re playing on this run are pretty much bucket-list kinds of venues. We’re doing Red Rocks in Colorado, which anytime I’ve seen anything there, it just looks insane. And I’m actually so excited. I just want to go there, let alone the fact that we’re actually playing a show there! I’m very excited for that. I would also say that is probably one that I’m nervous for because it’s just an amphitheatre kind of thing. Everyone’s seated and that, so that’ll be a fun one to try and not get people moving, I guess.

And yeah, the I Prevail tour is going to be an awesome one too. We’ve never played a show with those guys, but we’ve met them a handful of times over the years through other friends when we’re on tour, and so it’d be good to finally share the stage with them. And yeah, that run of shows is going to be great. I’m really looking forward to going back to Ally Pally—Alexandra Palace—in London. That’s such an awesome venue.

Over your career, what are some of the biggest moments that you still can’t quite believe actually happened?  

Our most recent one would be playing Rock Am Ring. Last year, we did a European summer fest run, and playing Rock Am Ring was a big deal for a lot of us in Polaris ever since we first got into alternative heavy music… that was the biggest stage and the biggest festival in this world of music that we live in. We’ve all watched all of our favourite bands playing that stage and playing this incredible festival, and it’s always been such a pipe dream of ‘One day I’d like to go and just exist at that festival,’ let alone even think about playing it. I just remember pulling up and being so giddy with excitement, like, “Holy shit! We’re here! We’re at the Rock Am Ring.”

It was a very, very, very full-on day. I barely spent any time backstage in the green room artist area. I just wanted to be out, and it was like pissing down rain. It was a really, really miserable day, but I just wanted to go out and explore and just see this massive stage and that massive crowd, and it was a really, really special show for sure. Yeah, and I mean a lot of shows on that summer run were pretty cool to be a part of. But yeah, that one is definitely a big highlight for sure.

And is there anything left on your bucket list to do?

I guess if we’re still talking about festivals, I guess playing Wacken Festival would be pretty sick. I mean, that is the biggest one you could do. Yeah, I’ll just go with that one. Other than that, I’d love to tour with Bring Me The Horizon. We played a show with them in Mexico two years ago, which was incredible. But yeah, I’d love to one day do a run of shows with them and another kind of bucket list one that we’ve got coming up. We’re touring with Linkin Park around Australia, which is pretty crazy. So that’ll be one soon to be ticked off.

We are very honoured to be sharing the stage with such a legendary band. Those shows are going to be wild! And again, not coming to Perth. I know, I know, Perth always misses out. It’s a shame. I feel sorry.

Yeah, it’s why we’re so happy that Froth and Fury isn’t going anywhere else except for Perth and Adelaide. 

Only Perth and Adelaide. Yeah, I think there’s a specific reason for that because exactly both Perth and Adelaide always miss out.

Your music often blends technical precision with raw vulnerability. What part of that balance comes most naturally to you, and what part pushes you outside your comfort zone?

I guess it’s kind of… both of them blend together. We push ourselves outside of our comfort zone, especially with our lyrical content that we sing about and that we talk about. And being able to, I guess, be so raw with some of our emotions and the content that we talk about… over time, I guess we’ve become quite comfortable doing that.

Also with every album as it goes on… it’s like, do we really want to get this deep? Do we really want to say that and sing about that or have that out to the world? Some pretty dark and personal stuff. At the same time, it’s something that we have. It’s in our DNA—it’s what we want to sing about and talk about and express, and there are a lot of people out in the world that I guess feel the same way or connect with our music and need to hear some of these things, as they can relate to it in their own lives.

You have talked about writing from a place of internal conflict rather than external narrative. Is there a track where your original lyrical intent was so personal that you guys debated whether it was ‘too raw’ to release?

Yeah, maybe. I’m thinking probably more with some of the newer stuff that we’ve been working on; that’s what’s springing to mind more than in the past for sure. I won’t say too much on because we have been working on new music, and a lot of what we are talking about is quite raw and quite heavy, and we have been having this exact conversation with shit like, ‘Is this really the road that we want to go down?’ Do we really want to be getting this real? But at the same time… of course it’s what we want to do. It’s what we feel we need to sing about, and yeah.

I mean, honestly, we need to talk about these kinds of things more as well.

Exactly. It’s why I love music. It connects us all. It’s a language that just hits inside and just moves you.

As a fan, it’s often quite hard to go up to your idols and say hello for fear of being turned away or fear of seizing up and sounding like an idiot. As a musician, how do you go about meeting your idols? Have you ever gone to speak to someone and just seized up?

Yeah, I have definitely made a fool of myself a few times! Before I was in Polaris and became what we have become, if you have that opportunity to see one of your idols, a band member you look up to… it’s like bands get put on this almost superstar kind of pedestal, like actors and actresses and all that stuff.

But being on this side of it, we’re just five dudes just making music. We’re no different than anyone else out there in the world just because we’re known for what we do. It doesn’t make us any more special; we’re still normal people trying to make ends meet. We’ve got lives; we’ve got our issues and everything.

There have been a few occasions where I seized up; I remember at Good Things—two, three, damn. I think it was three years ago when we played, when Bring Me The Horizon played, and it was the last show in Brisbane. I remember coming out of my dressing room, and I was going out to watch… I forget what band was playing, and I just happened to look to my left, and then I did a double take, and there was Oli Sykes about 30 or 40 metres away.

And I just went, “Oh shit, shit!” and I darted back behind the building because he was talking to people, and I didn’t want to be that guy to go up and interrupt a conversation, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll wait.” I felt such a creep. I waited until he started walking. And then I tried to do a little, tried to be really chill and just happen to naturally walk past and have a little conversation, but even knowing that he’s just a guy, he’s just doing this thing, and you can just go up and say, “Hey mate, love your shit.” That was pretty much all it was: “Big fan, love your shit.” But I still remember afterwards I was just kind of hyperventilating, like, “That just fucking happened! I’ve got 20 posters of this guy in my childhood bedroom. Holy crap!”

It’s always so funny; I see over the years when I’ve been selling our merch and stuff, or even just even still now to this day, if I’m at our show or… I think it’s more in a show environment where I notice some people kind of seize up, and I can see that they want to approach and they want to come say hi, so I’ll be like, “Hey, how are you doing?” or I’ll go up, or I’ll just… this probably sounds so bad, but you kind of acknowledge that they’re there. Then they kind of go “Oh!” and they come in and will say, “Hey, how are you doing?”

I always feel bad, especially because some people do get really worked up, and I’m like, “It’s all good. Just breathe. Just breathe. Hey, my name’s Jamie. What’s yours? Let’s have a chat.”

We love our fans. We love talking to our fans as much as we can when we get the chance to. The ones that always catch me off guard are like if I’m down at Woolly’s or at Coles, or the other day I was at a service station just filling up petrol, and no word of a lie, this car pulls up; music’s blaring. I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds pretty cool… wait… get fucked!’ It was Nightmare, the breakdown of Nightmare. The car door opens up, and this guy comes out, and he double-takes and is like, “No fucking way!” And I’m like, “No fucking way!” Really funny moment. What are the chances?

If you could collaborate with an artist completely outside the metalcore world, who would you pick and why? 

Oooh—outside the metalcore world. Does Pendulum count? I mean, me personally, I would love to collaborate with a drum and bass artist called Sub Focus. I love my electronic music. Doing something with them would be really cool. And it would probably be a similar thing to what Pendulum has done in the past with Bullet for My Valentine and In Flames, or even The Midnight. I think we and The Midnight could make some really cool music.

What bands do you currently have on rotation in your CD player? And are there any bands that you just didn’t get until you saw them live?

I mean, all I’ve been listening to lately is our demos and what we’ve been working on at the moment. But before that it was actually Pendulum’s latest album. I have had that on high rotation.

As for bands that I just didn’t get—yes, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head. I feel, especially in this day and age, it does come down to the live show. You can hear an album, you can hear a song on the radio, whatever, and it’s all well and good, but it really isn’t until you see it live and you see the live portrayal of how they represent their music. I think that really, live shows are the make or break for this industry. Especially when I was younger, you hear all these overprocessed vocals and really thickly produced music, and then you see the band live, and it just doesn’t sound like what you were expecting.

Polaris play Froth and Fury festival at Perth HPC on Saturday, January 24, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from frothandfuryfest.com