Today we’d like to introduce you to Roy Beatty.
Hi Roy, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
This isn’t necessarily my story so much as our story, with us being ENOX the band, but I’ll go ahead and warn you that it’s a lot. I’m Roy and I play bass in ENOX. I’m born and raised in Georgia, but somehow I ended up living in Jersey City for a few years, from 2016 to 2019 or so. I was playing bass in my previous band Lullwater based out of Athens, GA the time and I would just meet up with them when it came time to tour or write, but in the time between tour, I ended up going into a music shop and through pure chance I met Michael Guevarez, who is now the vocalist of ENOX. I heard him turn on an Animals as Leaders song on the shop speakers as I was leaving, so I had to turn back and strike up a conversation with him since I was ne win town and didn’t have any friends with similar musical interests. He told me he was in a band called Enochian and that they had an EP recorded (The Evolution EP, which is still available on Spotify) and ready to release but were struggling to find members, and once he showed me the music, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
The level of musicianship was top notch and it was the exact style of music I grew up loving, so I told him to send me the songs and I spent the next week listening to the songs on repeat and practicing them in all my free time in order to make a strong first impression. It turns out that wasn’t necessary, as they later told me I was the first bassist who had ever bothered to learn a single song of theirs before showing up to audition, so thank you to all the unprepared bassists who made me look a lot better than I was at the time. Myself, Michael, and Ernesto (founding guitarist) jammed through the songs I had learned, with Michael on drums no less, and we all instantly felt a connection. We spent a few years as Enochain cutting our teeth in the Northeast music scene, opening a few notable national shows and culminating in a Northeast US/Canada tour for two weeks in December of 2018, with seven people + gear + merch in a van with no trailer and no rear heating, which we miraculously survived.
Just before that tour, we had finalized a batch of 12 songs, with the song Convulsions being released under the name Enochain and performing better than anything we had previously put out. Between the success of Convulsions and seeing how people were reacting to the new songs live, we started to feel like we had something special with that batch of songs. We had all spent years trying to figure out how to efficiently be in bands and to promote music, and we got it into our heads that we needed a fresh start to let us come out swinging with a rebranded band. After months of agonizing over a name, we found it right in front of our eyes: For years, we had been shortening Enochian like Xmas to ENOX just because we didn’t wanna type all that, and we had also noticed people struggled to pronounce our name or even find us online. Our internet presence was buried under thousands of pages about occult magic or Supernatural the tv show. We picked the name ENOX and set our first song to release in March of 2021, just in time for the entire world to shut down due to the pandemic. We had been planning to do all the things a working band needs to do to grow once we started releasing music, so the removal of shows really affected our plans, but we pivoted and took the time locked inside to study how to market our music in order to do what we could within our power. It went pretty well, and we found success on the internet through promotions, TikTok, Instagram reels, and just anything else we could think of to have fun showing our music to the world.
So far not a lot of this seems super relevant to the ATL section of the VoyageATL name, but I feel like it was important to set the stage for the next phase of ENOX, which is a pretty drastic one. During the pandemic, a childhood friend of mine and myself scrimped and saved our unemployment money and flipped it into buying a house once things had somewhat normalized after COVID. We did this with the plan of moving all of ENOX down from New Jersey to Georgia, so we could focus on the band with as much effort as possible. By this point, our vocalist Michael had been studying production under Ricky Armellino for several years and was ready to start taking on projects of his own, so we set up a studio in our basement and have been recording ourselves and other bands we know. Michael produced our most recent single Mortar Shell, as well as several songs for ATL-based bands Hellhounds and FAUST, with a lot more to come pending some of our other friends’ band’s release plans. We have also played a fair amount around Atlanta since moving down, typically at the awesome Sabbath Brewing. The scene always shows out strong there and it’s such a fun time to see all our new friends we’ve met since moving down here. We’ve been here for almost 2 years as a band and it’s been starting to feel a lot more like home. The Atlanta metal scene has a ton of awesome bands in it, so I think you’ll be seeing a lot more bands coming from down here in the next few years.
Since moving to Georgia, ENOX has released our first full-length album Euphoria and toured throughout the rest of the year. We even did an entire US tour this summer, and our van broke down so we had to share a van for two weeks with another band, and THEN when we got it back the AC still was broken so we were struggling in the texas heat in the summer. We’ve been fighting for every step forward as a band, but we love what we do, and all the struggles are worth it for us to build up a band and a business as best friends and musicians.
We’re currently on the Explicit Content tour with Downswing and Weeping Wound, and we’ll be back at Sabbath Brewing on 3/22! If you wanna come out just shoot me an email and I’m sure we can get you on the guest list.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has been a long and bumpy road to say the least. Michael and co were struggling to find members when i met them, and we continued that trend for years as Enochian. Solidifying our lineup was part of what made us decide to become ENOX. We went through a few guitarists before we met Mikey, who slid into our DM’s the day we released Sadistic as Enochain and it’s been true love ever since, but drums were another story entirely. We went through a few members before we got John on drums, but in a funny twist of fate, he actually ended up moving to guitar once our founding member Ernesto stepped down. We had initially tried to get John before we met Mikey, but he was too busy and then when he wasn’t, we already had Mikey, so in the end things really worked out. The final piece of the puzzle was our drummer Mario Conte. We had asked him YEARS before, but he was busy and could only find time to play with us as a session drummer, which was out of our budget. Mario and Michael had been playing a ton of Smash Bros together while we were recording the EP we’ll be releasing later this year, and once we started sending him demos of the new songs he eventually got interested and decided to jump in. Years back he wanted us to hire him and now it’s him who is paying! Poor guy lmao, he’s the best.
Unrelated to member changes, there was also a period of a year where our vocalist Michael lived in our van due to live circumstances. We were all putting everything we had into the band, paying for the album and music videos and the van and this and that and the other that comes with trying to be in a serious band, so he chose to prioritize the band instead of his own comfort and we kept the train rolling full steam ahead.
Speaking of the van, ever since we started touring that has been a massive struggle. In December before we released Euphoria, we were on the road with our friend’s Levels and our tire popped, our radiator cracked, and half of our shocks fell off the frame and a tie rod broke. Later in the summer tour, our transmission blew out in Lake Tahoe and we had to slam all of our gear into our friends’ Smile on the Sinner’s trailer and cram in the van with them 15 deep, which is not as perfect of a fit for two weeks as it might sound. I built a wooden floor and bunks into our van so we can sleep in comfort and rough it comfortably on tour, but also because our front floor is rusted out pretty dramatically and it was the best way I could think to prevent us from falling to our deaths on the road. The day we can afford a new van is going to be the most relieving day of my life, but for now, we have to focus on the long-term plan and just keep working on releasing new music and trying to grow to the point where we can afford to be safe on the road. We would obviously love it if a good label deal came along, but we know our worth and we are not looking to sign a deal just for the sake of being signed. We’re trying to be here for a good and a long time, so right now I just think we are in the crunch phase of a business startup and things have definitely been moving in the right direction these past few years.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As a band, our goal has always been to play music that we love and to be able to play whatever we want to, For our debut album Euphoria, that manifested mostly as metalcore with some heavier elements, but the new music we are currently releasing is as heavy as anything coming out in the Deathcore scene right now, and I can’t say too much yet but the following release after that is gonna be another different path on the ENOX skill tree. It all sounds like ENOX, but we love a ton of different music and don’t want to be confined into anything anybody else expects.
A lot of what makes us able to do what we do is having a really strong group. We all get along amazingly, we all have different strengths, and we all have the same goals for the band. I’m incredibly proud that we are still here putting out music, despite having nobody but ourselves, our manager Wesley, and our cameraman extraordinaire James Perry as the core of operations. Our bassist has studied marketing and social media, and our vocalist has become an excellent producer in his own right, so we are able to do more and more things in-house. We don’t aim to be DIY specifically and would love the right help, but there is a sense of pride you get from doing things in your own way, trial and error and continuing to optimize the process. Right now we have a ton of big dreams and goals, but the reality of where we are at is still pretty great too. Much more than we ever could have expected, so hopefully it’s onwards and upwards.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think all of us are calculated risk takers. The idea of being in a band, dropping out of college to live with a bunch of dudes and try to get the music you make on your computer in your basement to sustain you and your co-conspirators is actually insane on paper, but we have all spent our lives trying to prepare for the right opportunity. A big saying in our band that we live by is you make your own luck, and if luck is where preparation and opportunity meet then we’ve been pretty lucky, but because we set ourselves up to be. We have all honed our crafts individually for years before we met, we are all unmarried with no children, willing to rough it in a van with 7 people or on floors around the country just to try and accomplish the bigger long-term goal. It was a huge risk for Micael to live in the van for a year instead of just saying he needed to ease off on his band obligations, but he didn’t even consider it for a moment because he fully believes in this. Us buying and moving into a house together 15 hours away from 4/5ths of the band’s hometown was a massive risk, but we saw the upside and the opportunities it would afford us, and in retrospect, it’s one of the main things that has enabled us to function the way we have for the last year.
Trying to seriously pursue the musician’s path as your main career is incredibly risky, but it’s also incredibly attainable with quality material, consistency, and a plan.
I think we all take these risks because to us, not taking them is the biggest risk. If we woke up in 20 years punching a clock for a menial job because we didn’t take the risks when we could have right now, now that would be the true worst outcome.
Contact Info:
- Website: ENOXband.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/enoxband
- Facebook: facebook.com/enoxband
- Twitter: twitter.com/enoxband
- Youtube: youtube.com/enoxband
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/enoxband
- Other: https://enox.bandcamp.com/ twitch.tv/enoxband
Image Credits
Josh Thompson (parking deck photo) Michael Leach (Outside press photos) James Perry (live photographs)
