“Many Times Before a Show, I Just Couldn’t Stop Crying” – How One of Japanese Metalcore’s Biggest Stars Reinvented Himself and Left the Fearless Metal Frontman Image Behind

Former Crystal Lake vocalist Ryo Kinoshita sat down with Rockline for a quick chat about how, after leaving the band, his new project Knosis gave him a musical and personal freedom he’d never known before.

When Ryo Kinoshita stepped on stage with Crystal Lake, it was hard to believe that behind one of the most high-energy frontmen in the Japanese metalcore scene was a person privately fighting a very different kind of battle. His stage persona was explosive – Ryo was the kind of guy who could kick off a moshpit practically during the soundcheck. But behind the scenes, the story was a lot darker.

Today, the former Crystal Lake vocalist speaks openly about the mental health struggles that led him to leave the band in 2022, and about how Knosis let him start making music without the pressure of having to be someone else.

“Many times before a show, I just couldn’t stop crying,” Ryo said in our conversation.

Crystal Lake – From Tokyo to the Global Metalcore Scene

Crystal Lake formed in Tokyo in 2002 and over the following years became one of the most important names in the Japanese metalcore scene. When Ryo Kinoshita joined the band in 2012, he brought a new level of energy, aggression and recognition with him.

With records like True North and Helix, the band gradually outgrew Japan. Helix came out in Japan in November 2018, and in the rest of the world in February 2019 via SharpTone Records.

In fact, 2019 marked the peak of their international rise. Crystal Lake were no longer just one of the more interesting Japanese metalcore bands, but a name that resonated strongly across the global scene, with a growing fanbase in Europe and the US too.

Ryo was one of the band’s key faces in all this. His distinctive vocal style and incredible stage energy became almost synonymous with Crystal Lake.

To the crowd, Ryo was unstoppable. Meanwhile, he was battling an adjustment disorder, a condition that can show up as an intense emotional or behavioral response to stressful life circumstances.

In 2022 he left the band. In a statement at the time, he described his condition like this:

“Sometimes everything goes completely black and you can’t move, like a corpse.”

“I Had to Be a Tough Guy”

Offstage, the pressure kept getting heavier. Ryo says that in Crystal Lake he felt he had to live up to a certain idea of what a metal vocalist should be.

“In Crystal Lake, I had to be a tough guy and act a certain way. But not anymore. Now I’m free.”

That feeling of liberation became one of the key elements of his new project.

After leaving Crystal Lake, Ryo was actually ready to give up music altogether. As he admits today, he was thinking about wrapping up his music career and opening a taco food truck.

Then his longtime friend Yosh Morita, vocalist and producer of the Japanese band Survive Said The Prophet, called.

Morita insisted that Ryo couldn’t stop creating.

“He told me I had to keep writing music and that I’m a treasure of the scene. He pulled me out of it.”

That friendship is what eventually gave birth to Knosis.

Knosis Started Out as Ryo’s Personal Project

The important thing to understand about Knosis is that it didn’t start out as a regular band with a ready-made lineup.

Ryo Kinoshita is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and vocalist, and in the beginning Knosis was practically his personal music project.

He wrote and recorded a big chunk of the instrumental material himself. Among other things, he played guitars too, and in Knosis’s early days he even stepped on stage with a guitar at some shows.

Only later did Knosis grow into a fuller live lineup, as its current members joined the project.

That’s a big part of the Knosis story. Ryo didn’t just want to make “the new Crystal Lake.” He wanted to find out what he could do when he no longer had to live up to the expectations that followed him in his old band.

Aggressive Music, but a Much More Personal Story

The result is Knosis – an explosive mix of metalcore, hardcore, extreme electronics, techno, punk and industrial.

The music can be brutally aggressive, but under the surface there’s a far more personal story. With the debut GENKNOSIS, Ryo also used his music as a way of dealing with his own experiences, loneliness and inner conflicts. And even though the sound is often even more extreme than what he did with Crystal Lake, the message is fundamentally positive: you don’t have to pretend to be something you’re not.

That may be the biggest difference between Crystal Lake and Knosis.

In Crystal Lake, Ryo became one of the most recognizable faces of Japanese metalcore and a member of a band that hit its global peak around 2019.

In Knosis, for the first time in his career, he can create without needing to fit a certain image.

He no longer has to be the fearless frontman. He can simply be Ryo.

And maybe that’s exactly why Knosis is more than just a new band from the former Crystal Lake vocalist – it’s the start of a chapter in which Ryo Kinoshita has finally found a way to be a musician on his own terms.