Their METAL GALAXY collab Brand New Day was so good that BABYMETAL and Polyphia simply had to team up again this summer. Here, then, is how Sunset Kiss came about…
Five years on from METAL GALAXY’s Brand New Day, BABYMETAL joined forces with Polyphia once again for Sunset Kiss, taken from their latest album METAL FORTH. Guitarist Scott LePage tells K! all about the specifics that go into working with the kawaii metal superstars…
What was the process of creating Brand New Day in 2019?
“We were on tour doing that one, and we were in a van at that time. It was one of those things where at every show, we’d get into the venue as early as possible and set up the station so we could work on this song. I think that tour was about three weeks long. Every day, me and Tim [Henson, guitar] would be just posting up, writing guitars. And by the end of the tour, our goal was to have it finished and have something to send to them, which we did!”
How did BABYMETAL end up shaping and directing you from their end?
“With Brand New Day, it was like, ‘Hey, here is the song, here are the guitars also.’ We were like, ‘Huh, wow, what do they want us to do?’ They were like, ‘We want you to record these guitars, but it’d be you doing it, and not these guitars that are on there at the moment.’ We thought, ‘Let’s put our flair on it and just do something completely different.’ Of course, I do some weird-ass harmonies, and I sent them over, and they were like, ‘Can you not do that and do this?’ It was kind of funny to me. I was like, ‘Damn, they really wanted to make sure I knew exactly what they meant.’”
Was it the same for Sunset Kiss, or did that differ?
“We were like, ‘We want to see how it feels to be at home and write a song with BABYMETAL.’ It was much, much more comfortable. Writing on tour is kind of a pain in the ass. This time, we were like, ‘We want to be able to do basically whatever we want on the guitars,’ because we knew we were going to do a lot of crazy shit, but not in a sense of being completely wacky and unfitting to the song. We wanted there to be some low-note metal stuff, crazy shred solos, warping up all the tracks and things like that, but it came out pretty normal-ish. They liked everything that we did. I think the first email they sent back, there were a few things, and me and Tim were just like, ‘We really liked those parts, can we keep those?’ They were like, ‘Oh yeah, of course.’ The only thing that we had to change was they wanted to extend the solo sections. It was less stressful because we’re not on tour, and we knew what we were doing this time around.”
This interview originally appeared in the special-edition Kerrang! Presents BABYMETAL magazine.
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