DI: Inland Empire mentality for us is to keep it real and show support to other artists. No elitist shit.
// INCARI is: David Iniguez on bass, Hector Rivera on drums/vox, & Jordy Campos on guitar. //
HR: Gotta ride hard for your homies cause oftentimes, we get overlooked just for living like 45 minutes away. And it’s important to show love out here cause folks get into a herd mentality where something’s not cool until it’s cool to like it. Just being from the IE, reppin the IE… I feel like more people are reppin the IE now because they see other people on this area code shit hard. And that’s exactly what we need. If you’re doing cool s*** you BETTER let them know you’re from the 909 or from the 951. That’s when you start getting eyes out here, people start looking over here to see what’s up. You’ll never catch INCARI putting LA in our bio.
Things can snowball quick too, you just need to start somewhere and build a sense of community. That’s why we rock with these IEHC fools heavy, cause they just have such a good sense of community going right now.
Also about the no-elitist shit David mentioned – that goes hand in hand with being inclusive. Encourage your friends to create things & help with whatever resources you can provide. Brown people being in music is important, just as women and queer folks are, and any other marginalized groups. Especially in the IE where we hardly have places to play at. We need to make damn sure to take up space in the little spaces we do have available.
JC: That’s what feels different being from out here, it’s hard finding good spaces to play at. They’re either too expensive to book a local bill, have a bar crowd that won’t ever care about your band, or it’s a DIY spot that eventually gets burnt out & shut down for one reason or another. RIP Baseline.
DI: And thanks to our people in downtown San Bernardino who let us book shows there and do our thing in the past. Always good having places to play at in our own city, just down the block.
HR: We promote ourselves as a doom/sludge band to generalize, also because that’s where a lot of our sound is derived from, but we’re forsure more of an alternative/experimental metal band. It’s been hard to play gigs where we feel like it makes perfect sense being there. We’re usually the loudest band on a softer bill or the least heavy band on a heavy bill. Still do our best to squash the crowd at every show though, doesn’t matter the place or the size of the crowd.
JC: Shout out all the doom bands we catfish by telling them we play the genre when we actually kind of don’t… <laugh>
We put out our single Rat King a few months ago and that was pretty big for us since we hadn’t dropped music in about 3 years at that point. And even Rat King is like 2 years old to us at this point, so it felt good to finally put it out and move forward.
HR: We had an EP written in like 2020 but scrapped it completely because we already wrote new songs we felt way more proud of; didn’t make sense to re-record/rerelease old material when we already had better songs written. And even now we’re going through the same process of putting out these old (to us) songs so we can work on our new tracks. It’s been a long process of refining our songwriting abilities and figuring everything out. None of this has ever been easy to us.
I did all the tracking myself for Rat King and sent it off to Andrew Jay + Nick Townsend for mixing/mastering. It was kind of scary but they did a great job at making us sound how we should. I learned a lot about tracking just from sending out that one song… We’re recording a short EP right now to drop next year, after that we have another 2 short releases planned that we’re still figuring out and writing for. One of them might be a split with our good IE doom homies, but you’ll hear more about it as it develops.
JC: Our upcoming releases will be different from Rat King but still have the same sense of aggression. We’ll dive into slightly different sounds, but otherwise it’ll be cohesive with everything we do. You’ll be like, Yeah, that’s the same band. INCARI.
HR: All caps when you spell the band’s name.
https://incari.bandcamp.com/track/rat-king
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