RISING INSANE: Turning Riffs Into Something We Can Scream Together
- Lysandre Pons
- 17 minutes ago
- 7 min read
With Deathrace, RISING INSANE returned to their metalcore roots while opening up about grief, trauma and the power of community. When we speak, the album has been out for just a few days. The band still feels the excitement from it, and maybe some relief, “it’s finally released and we got it done!” says the band’s guitarist Sven Polizuk.
For a long time, these songs have belonged to them. They have lived with the demos, the rewrites, the discussions over direction and the inevitable moments of wondering whether a song actually works. Now they are on Spotify. People are listening and they become part of our lives as well. “It’s definitely a very, very special feeling for each member of the band when you work for so long on an album and you get a feeling that this is it, this is a really good album, we’re onto something here.” he elaborates. “And when you finally release it and you see the songs on Spotify popping up, the playlists it got featured on, that's a very, very special day and we are still hyped from the release day last week. There's this energy going on and we're all very happy about it.”
There is a moment in almost every band's career when progression stops meaning “more” and starts meaning “back.” For RISING INSANE, that moment happened somewhere between the road and the rehearsal room. After Wildfires, the German metalcore band had begun moving towards something more modern, “there were more synths, clean hooks, maybe a bridge or a breakdown with screams. We were on this path to make this kind of modern metal music stuff. And then we realised when we were touring that we were missing this old metalcore riffing. Just sit down with your guitar and write some riffs. I think that’s what got us hooked the most.” Sven explains.
So they did something that is arguably harder than reinventing yourself: they stopped. “We decided to abandon all the old demos, all this modern stuff and go back to the roots like with Nation or Afterglow.” he confides. That guitar and drum focused approach, ultimately became the foundation of Deathrace, and the album hits with that intent and impact from the moment it starts. When listening to the record pre-release, it felt like an album designed for live shows - however the band mentions that it isn't something they set out to create. “It was not on purpose” they say. “It’s just something that came through the writing process itself.” And maybe that’s why it feels so unifying, because it is raw and genuine.
RISING INSANE's creative process usually starts with a riff. The music comes first, with instrumental ideas passed between the members before Aaron begins working on vocals and lyrics. “Normally we are going to start with the music,” Sven explains. “It’s just picking up the guitar, trying to write some riffs and record them. It's kind of a back-and-forth process. ” It is a process of trial and error. Some ideas become songs, others don't. The band isn’t interested in forcing every demo into a finished track; they follow the material that gives them a genuine creative flow and that feels right to them.
For vocalist Aaron Steineker, these notes can become a way to process pain. Following the loss of his sister in 2018, its weight has continued to echo through his songwriting, finding a place across their records: “It had a huge impact on me, my family and my whole life, you struggled for years with that. And I can put this struggle and pain into the songs since Porcelain, then Afterglow, Wildfires and now Deathrace.” On Deathrace, that process becomes particularly direct in TRAUMATIZED, a song about the lasting impact of that loss. “I write, sing, scream about this trauma that this loss has left me with.” he explains.
But while going through this, he also still thinks of others who may struggle: “I try to give our fan base, the listener, a point they might refer to and take some strength out of the songs that we write.” RISING INSANE builds spaces where listeners can bring their own experiences, one song at a time. There is, however, a cost to that openness. “When you put out songs where you really open up to the audience, you kind of feel naked." Aaron admits. “You share some really intimate feelings with the whole world.” The band still wears it with bravery, showing that the response from their audience has made that vulnerability worth it.
Aaron recounts how fans have approached them at shows and at the merch table to say that the songs helped them through difficult times. And that there are the moments when the band can see that connection happening in real time: "Even on stage when I sing specific parts, I can see the faces of the people screaming them back to us, and I know that they are feeling it.” He remembers especially playing Something Inside of Me a lot on the last tour and witnessing peoples’ struggles through the performance and its reception. “Then seeing these people at the merch table, giving them a hug. That’s pretty huge for me," he explains.
It is not just singing along, it becomes a collective experience. A lyric that began with one person's grief can become a sentence that somebody else desperately needed to hear. A scream written in isolation can be returned by hundreds of voices. That is where the aggression of Deathrace takes on another meaning. It becomes a catharsis, a way of letting something out. They show us that vulnerability and aggression can co-exist because, sometimes, that is what pain feels like but that community can make it more bearable.
That honesty also extends to the band's creative process. When asked whether there was a particularly difficult song to write, Aaron immediately has an example: DARK. Sven sent him the instrumental, and he remembers thinking “this is gonna be a banger.” Then he wrote his first version of the vocals and thought he had gone too far in the experimentation. So they took time to put it aside and rethink it. Eventually, they returned to it and rebuilt it almost completely, with Sven helping develop the ideas that became the final version. It is a revealing story because it shows that sometimes to make something great you need to overcome the fear of stopping and starting again.
They also push limits on Deathrace with new collabs: “With each person it was kind of a no-brainer, like with Matt from CASKETS or Tino from ACCVSED.” Sven illustrates. They approach each collab as an additional force for impact, going through their songs with the lens of what could go harder with someone else joining in. When asked who they would like to collab with in the future both members agreed that “the flow of LANDMVRKS would be a really nice fit. These aggressive vocals would be a very fun feature!”.
Their approach to vocals and music also comes from their influences, which they name as, for example: ARCHITECTS, LANDMVRKS, FIT FOR A KING or POLARIS. But while writing the album, they deliberately tried to listen to less metal. Sven explains that he wanted to avoid becoming too influenced by it, sometimes just listening to the radio during the writing process.
Aaron, meanwhile, was thinking about voices that felt raw rather than perfectly polished. Kurt Cobain was one of those influences. “He had such a raspy voice and it was so raw, not overproduced” he says. “And also the way of switching from fry screams into false cores and into clean, singing shouts that Jamie Hails of POLARIS does really hooked me up for last years and I definitely wanted to give it a try. I think you might hear that in TRAUMATIZED”.
When asked which track they would in turn suggest to someone discovering RISING INSANE for the first time, they reflect on a few for the different aspects they bring to the table. They mention that Narcissus would be an unexpectedly favourite for their bassist, Ulf Hedenkamp. That the song can give the feeling of what it’s like when they’re slower, add weighted textures and take their time. DIRT can give an almost waltz-like feeling, and Aaron also points towards GREY, particularly because of its post-chorus guitar riff and closing solo. They however agree that TRAUMATIZED naturally carries particular musical weight and emotional significance and they would gravitate towards recommending it because of what it represents.
What's next for RISING INSANE? For now, the band are enjoying the direction they've found: “We will stay with the riffs.” They already have ideas for the future and some material in their pockets, but are firstly excited to take their new album to the stage.
However, preparing to tour also means choosing the setlist. There is a lot more to it than simply picking the songs everyone likes. They want to showcase Deathrace without alienating people who have been following them for years but also consider listeners who discovered them specifically because of the new album. They need to build tension, decide when the crowd should jump, when a circle pit makes sense, when a wall of death might happen and somehow make the whole thing feel emotionally coherent. “It’s not as easy, you can’t be like, okay, this song didn’t work last night, so we take another one,” they explain. The solution is rehearsal, lots of it. “Sometimes you got songs that sound really, really great on a record and then you’re playing it and then think, oh, maybe we have to take another approach to it.” Some songs, they explain, have a kind of “symbiosis” with the tracks around them. Remove one and suddenly the next doesn't hit in quite the same way.
They’re deep in the process of constructing this emotional rollercoaster and will be kicking off with a befitting start: Rocken Hilft Festival For Mental Health on October 24th. It will then be followed by a German tour starting in Munich on November 5th. While it is currently the main focus, the band expressed that they would love to play abroad.
Sharing their music with people everywhere is after all what they look forward to beyond everything. The feeling of standing in a room and knowing that something you once wrote alone now belongs to everyone in it. Deathrace may have been born from a decision to go back to the roots, but RISING INSANE keeps growing and surprising.
RISING INSANE released their latest album Deathrace on 21st August 2026 via Long Branch Records and are currently gearing up for their Deathrace Tour across Germany later this year.
Words: Lysandre Pons
Photos: Katharina Sterl
With thanks to: Hold Tight and Rising Insane
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