Metal Special: Periphery

It’s a chipper Misha Mansoor that talks to us on the phone. “I’m driving down toCape Codwith my girlfriend for a holiday,” he says with an audible grin. “So I have a lot of interviews to wrap up today.”

Mansoor has more than one reason to be chipper. His band Periphery, one of the forerunners of modern metal and vanguard of the now contentious “djent” genre, has just released their second studio album Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal. “I’ve been waiting for this for a while. It’s been done for a little bit, we’ve worked so hard on it. It’s going to feel very cathartic when it comes out,” laughs Mansoor.

Periphery’s, and Mansoor’s, success stems from the burgeoning social media scene and his importance lies in how he opened up the possibilities for musicians to be able to reach out to a wide audience without ever leaving their room. The band has been a crucial influence on artists like Keshav Dhar, whose project Skyharbor followed a similar trajectory to Mansoor’s.

Periphery was born out of Mansoor’s influential solo project Bulb. Bulb took off as a internet project on music hosting website SoundClick, where he’d upload his self-produced tracks for free listening. As the popularity of Bulb grew, Mansoor began looking for members to form a full fledged band. Periphery was formed in 2005 and saw a series of line-up changes and the band released their debut album only in 2010. But Periphery’s second album sees the band more settled in their sound and seemingly more like a complete band than an extension of a solo project, something Mansoor says he’s wanted for a long time. “I’ve just been waiting for the right group of people. I used to fantasize about the day where I could just be like, “Oh, don’t ask me, I’m just the guitarist. I don’t know,” he laughs.

When did you start writing and recording this album?

We’re always in a state of writing so a lot of the ideas got worked on before we officially sat down and decided to work on the album, but we really started putting everything together in October last year and we’ve kinda been at it non-stop in and around the tours that we’ve had until about May so it’s been a long ride [laughs].

And you have had a busy year of touring, haven’t you? You had your first headlining tour too.

Yeah, last year September-October, that was our first headlining tour, and that actually went really well. It was kinda overwhelming, because we didn’t know what to expect from a headliner, but we had a good package and that was a lot of fun.

(Pick up the July issue of ROLLING STONE India to read the full interview)