When it comes to modern metal, few things are more limiting than the expectations placed on artists to remain exactly who their audience first discovered them to be. Genres become boxes. Fans become attached to particular sounds. And eventually, experimentation can be treated almost like betrayal. For ENTHEOS vocalist Chaney Crabb, however, refusing to be confined by those expectations has become an important part of the band’s identity.
With ENTHEOS preparing to release their new album, Empty On The Inside, Crabb sees the record as more than another step in the band’s discography. It represents years of growth, experimentation, learning how to write together, and ultimately becoming comfortable with the idea that ENTHEOS does not need to fit neatly into anyone else’s definition of what a metal band should be.
In conversation, Crabb opened up about the album’s dynamic nature, the importance of songwriting over technical showmanship, embracing darkness rather than running from it, and why Empty On The Inside ultimately became a record about accepting the parts of ourselves and life that cannot simply be changed.
A BAND THAT REFUSES TO STAY IN ONE BOX
One of the first things that becomes apparent when discussing Empty On The Inside with Crabb is that ENTHEOS‘ evolution isn’t simply about adding different sounds for the sake of experimentation. The band’s willingness to move between musical worlds is becoming fundamental to who they are.
Crabb believes the new record makes that clearer than ever.
“I think it was obvious before that we were a dynamic band, but just that we are truly a dynamic band.”
For Crabb, the distinction is important. ENTHEOS has always existed somewhat outside traditional genre boundaries, but she feels Empty On The Inside demonstrates that independence more completely. In the past, listeners could still attempt to place ENTHEOS alongside particular scenes or genres. Now, Crabb feels the band has reached a point where it is increasingly difficult and unnecessary to categorize them.
“I think that we’re just like really our own band. Like, truly more so than being dynamic. That we’re really just like a standalone band, and we don’t really follow a set of rules, or what other people are doing.”
That philosophy has become increasingly important as the band members have grown individually and collectively. Crabb points out that musicians change. Their interests change. Their influences change. Their lives change. Yet when a band establishes itself under a particular genre label, audiences can sometimes expect that label to become a permanent contract. The problem is that musicians aren’t static.
Crabb explained that younger bands can sometimes unintentionally put themselves into boxes from the very beginning by announcing exactly what genre they belong to. Once that happens, listeners can begin developing expectations about what that band is supposed to sound like. As the members grow older and discover new interests, those expectations can become restrictive.
For ENTHEOS, Crabb doesn’t want that. The band is able to pull from multiple musical worlds while still maintaining its metal foundation.
“We’re kind of a vessel for all different kinds of genres, but our inner compass is led by metal.”
That doesn’t mean ENTHEOS is abandoning heaviness. Instead, metal becomes the foundation from which the band can explore. And for Crabb personally, that freedom is especially meaningful because it allows her to explore sides of her creativity that might not fit neatly into a traditional extreme-metal formula She openly admits that much of the music she listens to contains little or no screaming.
“I obviously love to sing, and I love like super, like sad girl type shit. That’s what I listen to.”
That contrast isn’t something she sees as a problem. It’s part of who she is.
WHY CHANEY DOESN’T NEED A SIDE PROJECT
That freedom has also affected how Crabb views her place within ENTHEOS.
Many musicians eventually create side projects because they feel there are ideas they can’t express within their primary band. For Crabb, that hasn’t necessarily been the case. She feels fortunate that ENTHEOS gives her enough creative space to explore those different interests.
“I don’t want to be in a band where I’m longing to do something that I don’t feel like I’m allowed to do.”
That freedom has allowed her to avoid feeling as though she needs another outlet simply to explore a different part of herself.
“I really enjoy being in my band because of that. Like, I don’t feel like any of us really or for me particularly; it’s like I don’t feel the need to have a side project or join another band because I feel like I can kind of do everything that I want to do within my own band.”
That may be one of the most revealing aspects of Crabb’s relationship with ENTHEOS. Rather than viewing genre experimentation as something that needs to happen outside the band, she sees it as part of the band’s natural evolution. And that evolution becomes especially important when considering how drastically musicians can change over time.
YOU AREN’T THE SAME PERSON YOU WERE 20 YEARS AGO
During the conversation, the discussion turned toward bands that have faced backlash after changing their sound.
For Crabb, this is a particularly frustrating aspect of the metal community. She pointed to the tendency for audiences to reject artists when they introduce elements that weren’t present earlier in their careers. A band might release a record that includes cleaner vocals, softer passages, electronic elements, or different songwriting structures, only to have listeners demand that they return to the sound that originally made them popular.
But Crabb questions why musicians should be expected to remain frozen in time. A person who begins a band at 18 isn’t necessarily going to have the same musical interests at 38.
“Imagine how different you are from the time you’re 18 years old to 38 years old.”
It’s a simple observation, but one that speaks directly to the philosophy behind Empty On The Inside. Growth doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning what came before. It means allowing yourself to become something different.
Crabb also discussed the irony of this happening within metal, a genre that has historically celebrated individuality and pushing boundaries.
“Metal is supposed to be this genre that like is accepting of everyone, and we’re in it for the music.”
Yet she feels that sometimes the community can become more restrictive than other musical spaces. She compared that with pop music, where artists can move between sounds much more freely. A pop artist can make an album, experiment with a different style, or release something influenced by whatever is currently exciting them without necessarily facing the same level of resistance. For Crabb, musicians should be afforded that same freedom regardless of genre.
IT’S NOT ABOUT PROVING YOU’RE THE BEST
Another major point of the conversation centered around musicianship. Extreme metal is filled with incredibly technical players, and ENTHEOS is certainly capable of delivering complex musicianship. But Crabb doesn’t believe technical ability alone makes a song memorable. For her, songwriting has to come first.
She expressed frustration with the tendency for musicians to focus so heavily on proving their technical abilities that the actual song becomes secondary.
“Songwriting is sacrificed for the sake of throwing a bunch of riffs in there that no one actually gives a fuck about.”
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t appreciate great musicianship. Quite the opposite. But technical ability should serve the song rather than replace it. Crabb wants people to connect with music beyond simply recognizing how difficult a particular part is to perform.
“I think that really what separates people is writing a good song.”
A technically impressive passage might make another musician stop and analyze what happened, but a great song can stay with someone for years. It can become something a person listens to while driving. Something they put on during lunch. Something that helps them through a difficult day. Something that becomes attached to a memory.
For Crabb, that’s the difference. She doesn’t want listeners to feel like they have to study an ENTHEOS song to appreciate it. She wants the music to communicate. And that philosophy helped shape Empty On The Inside.
“WE ARE HERE. AND WE MEAN BUSINESS.”
Crabb describes Empty On The Inside as a statement piece for ENTHEOS. But the statement isn’t about proving that the band can play complicated music. It’s about establishing who they are.
“Just that we are here, and like I said, we’re a dynamic band, and we mean business, and we’re here to write good songs.”
Getting to that point required years of experience. Crabb explained that ENTHEOS‘ members came into the band with different histories and experiences as musicians. Some had been accustomed to working more independently, and that affected the band’s early songwriting process. Over time, however, that changed. One of the biggest shifts was the role of vocals.
Crabb described how vocals were once more of an afterthought within the songwriting process, whereas now they are often one of the first considerations.
“The vocals are absolutely not the afterthought anymore; they’re the first thought a lot of the time.”
That evolution has allowed ENTHEOS to become more cohesive. Rather than each musician attempting to demonstrate what they can individually accomplish, the focus has shifted toward what the band can accomplish together. Crabb credits experience with helping them arrive at that mentality.
She also pointed to the impact of working with producer Mark Lewis, particularly through Navene Koperweis’ previous experience working on Whitechapel’s The Valley.
According to Crabb, that experience changed Koperweis‘ approach to songwriting and helped him pay much closer attention to vocals. Eventually, those experiences contributed to ENTHEOS working with Lewis themselves. For Crabb, it is another example of how the seemingly disconnected experiences of a band’s history can eventually lead somewhere meaningful.
“You have to go through everything to get to a point, and we’ve had to do that.”
LEARNING TO ACCEPT THE DARKNESS
Perhaps the deepest portion of the conversation came when discussing identity.
Empty On The Inside isn’t simply concerned with darkness as something negative. Instead, Crabb sees darkness as something that can exist alongside happiness and something that can even become part of a person’s creative identity. When asked whether making the album had changed how she viewed herself, Crabb immediately connected with the question.
“It has changed how I think about identity because the entire record is essentially about… accepting it as a part of you.”
For Crabb, that means acknowledging depression, sadness, difficult experiences, and darker emotions without necessarily treating them as things that must be completely eliminated. She doesn’t frame darkness as something that makes someone broken. Instead, it can become something from which a person learns. Something that can inspire art.
Something that can force introspection. Something that can reveal parts of yourself you may otherwise never have confronted.
“Using it as a tool to become… to create art, to use it to draw or paint or become a better person or learn something about yourself.”
That perspective ultimately led to what Crabb describes as a major shift in her own identity:
“Embracing both bad and good parts of myself, and accepting myself.”
There is an important distinction there. The album isn’t celebrating suffering for its own sake. It’s about recognizing that darkness is part of being human.
Crabb acknowledges that happiness matters and that she experiences happy moments, but she also recognizes that she often feels most creatively driven when she is working through something difficult.
“I feel the most driven to create when I’m dealing with something, when I’m going through something dark.”
That darkness becomes fuel for creativity rather than something that automatically needs to be suppressed.
WHY SADNESS CAN BECOME CREATIVE FUEL
The conversation became particularly personal when discussing how sadness affects creativity. For Crabb, there is something inherently valuable about allowing yourself to experience melancholy rather than immediately trying to escape it. That doesn’t mean sadness is preferable to happiness.
Instead, it means sadness deserves to exist without being treated as an unacceptable emotion. The conversation around this idea also connected with the atmosphere of the new record. Crabb described herself as someone who genuinely enjoys sad music and even finds herself particularly drawn toward melancholy during autumn.
That seasonal connection became a natural extension of the album’s emotional world. And it fits with one of the larger ideas running through Empty On The Inside: sometimes the emotions people attempt to run away from are the very emotions that teach them the most about themselves.
THE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY OF EMPTY ON THE INSIDE
While individual songs from the record can obviously exist independently, Crabb hopes listeners experience Empty On The Inside as an entire journey. At the heart of that journey is acceptance. Acceptance of yourself. Acceptance of darkness. Acceptance of emotions. And eventually, acceptance of the fact that there are things in life that cannot be controlled.
Crabb specifically pointed toward the album’s closing track, “The Earth Will Move,” as an important part of that idea.
“The world moves on with or without you.”
It’s a powerful concept because it doesn’t necessarily come from a place of hopelessness. Instead, it can be understood as perspective. Our individual experiences can feel enormous while we’re living through them, but the world itself continues moving. Feelings change. Moments pass. People come and go.
And eventually, even the things that feel impossible to survive become part of the past. Crabb explained that much of her writing moves in this direction. We live in an enormous world, but our individual experiences are incredibly small in comparison. There are people we will never meet. Places we will never see. Lives we will never understand. Even people who live just a few houses away may have entire worlds that we will never enter. That realization can be melancholy, but Crabb also finds something meaningful in accepting it.
THE SADNESS OF NEVER KNOWING EVERYTHING
One of the references Crabb brought into the discussion was The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a book centered around words describing complicated emotional experiences that don’t always have conventional names. She described the book as something that gave language to feelings she had experienced but couldn’t necessarily articulate. That idea connects directly to the emotional foundation of Empty On The Inside.
Sometimes sadness doesn’t come from something dramatic happening. Sometimes it comes from simply realizing how much of life we will never experience. There are people we’ll never meet. Stories we’ll never hear. Homes we’ll never see inside. Places we’ll never visit.
Lives that will continue existing completely outside our own. That doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. It is simply part of being human.
And that is where the title Empty On The Inside becomes particularly interesting. The word “empty” might initially sound entirely negative, but Crabb doesn’t necessarily view emptiness that way. Instead, it can represent the complicated space where all of these emotions, experiences, limitations, memories, and possibilities exist. The darkness isn’t necessarily something that needs to be filled. Sometimes it simply needs to be understood.
“HELL IS A PART OF ME”
One phrase Crabb highlighted during the conversation was “Hell Is A Part Of Me.” For her, that song encapsulates much of what Empty On The Inside represents. Hell represents darkness. The difficult parts. The experiences we wish we could change. The emotions that aren’t always comfortable.
But those things are still part of us. Trying to completely erase them can mean trying to erase pieces of our own history. Instead, Crabb’s approach is to acknowledge them.
“Hell is the darkness, the bad things, but it’s all a part of you.”
That idea may ultimately be one of the strongest threads connecting the record. Empty On The Inside isn’t necessarily about defeating darkness. It’s about learning how to coexist with it.
WHY CHANEY VALUES AN INTERVIEW THAT DOESN’T STAY ON SCRIPT
Interestingly, our conversation eventually turned away from the album itself and toward the nature of interviews. And that became an unexpectedly fitting ending. Crabb appreciated that the conversation didn’t feel like a checklist of standard promotional questions.
Instead, one question led naturally into another. A discussion about genre became a conversation about artistic freedom. That became a discussion about aging. Which became a conversation about songwriting. Which eventually became a discussion about sadness, identity, creativity, and the strange ways humans experience life.
Crabb referenced the television series How To with John Wilson as an example of following a subject wherever it leads. That same philosophy applies to interviewing. Instead of forcing a conversation back toward the original list of questions, sometimes the most interesting material comes from following an unexpected thread.
Crabb summed up her own appreciation for that kind of conversation by describing the interview as feeling like simply talking. And that may be what made the discussion surrounding Empty On The Inside so revealing. Rather than treating the album as a collection of technical achievements or genre classifications, the conversation uncovered the person behind the music.
ENTHEOS AREN’T INTERESTED IN STANDING STILL
Ultimately, Empty On The Inside appears to represent a period of considerable artistic confidence for ENTHEOS. Not confidence rooted in proving that the band can play faster, heavier, or more technically demanding music than everyone else. Confidence rooted in knowing that they don’t need to prove that anymore. They’ve spent years developing their musicianship. They’ve experienced different creative environments.
They’ve learned how to work together. They’ve learned how important vocals are to the songwriting process. And perhaps most importantly, they’ve become more comfortable allowing themselves to experiment.
For Chaney Crabb, that freedom is essential. A band should be allowed to grow. Musicians should be allowed to change. And listeners, even when they don’t immediately understand a new direction, should be willing to recognize that the people making the music are not the same people they were when their first record came out.
Empty On The Inside is therefore less about staying inside the lines and more about understanding why those lines don’t have to exist in the first place. It’s an album about darkness without treating darkness as an enemy. It’s about sadness without shame. It’s about identity without demanding that identity remain fixed. And it’s about accepting that life continues moving regardless of whether we’re ready for it.
As Crabb puts it, “The earth will move.” And perhaps the most important thing ENTHEOS is doing on Empty On The Inside is allowing themselves to move with it.
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