It’s pronounced “en-san-ya.” Not “insane-ya.” I know, I don’t get it either. If a band ever deserved to have the word “insane” in their name, it is these guys. The Raleigh, North Carolina four piece are all between the ages of 16 and 19 and seem furiously focused on getting as much raw angst out of “teen-” before “-ager” forces them to settle down, assuming the world survives long enough for them to grow up at all. As Mac, guitar, puts it; “I feel like a lot of the older generation doesn't really care about the generation in front of them. That's something you should worry about because as humans, we should lift each other up, of course.” As for the title of their new EP, The World Is Coming to An End? “That's what it feels like right now. You know what I mean? It feels like everybody's just kind of mad at each other.” Living in North Carolina means relative peace but South Carolina isn’t far and it’s a different story down there. Alex, drums; "Driving right into South Carolina there was a giant Confederate flag that was up for so long. I think they just finally took it down.”
And yet, despite all of that, Insanya are optimists at heart. “For such angry music, we're really positive people,” says Ari, bass, “Everybody who comes to our shows are such nice people. You see people beating the shit out of each other and you talk to them out there and they're like, ‘Yeah, man, I really enjoyed the show!’” Alex: “If we could inspire another group of kids to do the same shit that we're doing, that's all I care about.”
Not only do I assure that will happen, it probably already has. The songs on The World Is Coming To An End have that effect, they make you want to pick up a drop tuned guitar and start figuring these songs out by ear (doesn’t sound hard and I bet it would be fun as hell). Junior’s rap vocals have an italicised forward motion delivery, like he’s sprinting ahead of the beat while everyone else is just running. The guitars know when it’s time to jam out a riff but also when to let power chords sweep and hold before diving into the next uber satisfying hammer on/pull off passage (“God’s Palm” once again confirming that all the best riffs are just alternating switch offs between any of the first five frets). But before you start screaming “Slipknot!” just know that the first influence they gave me was… 18 Bonez, a band that released one EP to zero fanfare in 2003 yet somehow have 40,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and I had never even heard of them. Alex: “I'm so glad that they're finally making a comeback. They're on Instagram, they're fucking active. They're talking about doing a bunch of shit.”
It’s this kind of subsurface influence that makes the new wave of nu-metal bands sound slightly more afield from our standard legacy acts. 157frq’s bassist has multiple Nothingface tattoos; Empty Shell Casing namecheck Guts Syndicate as an influence making them almost certainly the first band ever to namecheck Guts Syndicate as an influence; Prodigal wax rhapsodic about Staind’s inaccessible debut album Tormented, not the multi-platinum Break the Cycle; Symposia cover Pleymo’s “Blohm” live in concert in its original French despite none of the members speaking French.
None of this makes any fucking sense. Nu metal, the entire genre, was dead and buried just six years ago. Now kids who weren’t even alive for Linkin Park’s Meteora are worshipping at the altar of bands that didn’t sell half of half of what that album did in its first day on sale. Yet, here we are. Nu metal was always bigger than the SystemKornBizkitTonesParkKnot bands that defined it, now it’s better too. With young acts like Insanya pulling the genre into the future it deserves, there’s no telling how much bigger it might be either. If the world really is coming to an end, Insanya are going out on their terms and nobody else’s.
