INTRODUCING: Not Enough Space
Florida’s NOT ENOUGH SPACE found themselves at the centre of a viral moment earlier this year, from their 2024 single Primitive gaining traction through TikTok. Fans quickly dubbed them “moancore” because of – unsurprisingly – the unexpected moan right before its breakdown. Naturally, with opinions split and people deciding it was either hilarious or the worst thing to happen to music, it gave the band plenty of exposure to keep winning over more fans, just as they’d been steadily doing for a few years. Before the release of their debut album Weaponize Your Rage back in September, we got in touch with their vocalist duo Liv Mitchell and Lizzie Raatma to talk about the band’s origins and, naturally, moancore.
Early introductions to EVANESCENCE, NIGHTWISH and the like for Lizzie and Liv starting off with THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER and ATREYU means the duo have spent much of their lives around heavy music, so joining a band – albeit at different times – made perfect sense. Lizzie co-founded the band in 2018, though as she admits, it had a very different form at that point. That formation – powered by a website she calls “the Tinder for musicians, but even worse” saw the band start in far less heavy territory.
“We were originally doing almost alt rock like PARAMORE, AVRIL LAVIGNE sound when I joined,” Liv recalls when she joined around 2022. “[Lizzie] had messaged me when I joined saying they were looking for someone who can scream and do harmonies. I said, oh, that’s me!” Finding common ground in a shared enjoyment of 2010s metalcore bands like ASKING ALEXANDRIA, it made for an easy jumping off point for them to start exploring a new path for themselves. An early question fans are likely to have either way though, is – where on earth did their name come from?
As it turns out, in those early days they were playing various open mic shows and it simply stemmed from one of them. “We would go to them, some were ready for anything like backing tracks, loads of stuff onstage, they could do it. But this one, I don’t know what we were thinking,” Lizzie smiles of the fateful gig that gave them their name. “The one we were playing at was at an auditorium and there was a podium in the middle, blocking everything and there was no room. It was very awkward! The host asked us, ‘What’s your band name?’ and we didn’t have one. So she said ‘here’s to not enough space,’ and it’s stuck ever since!”
There were moments they thought about changing it but “it just rolls off the tongue a little too well,” and, ultimately, when Covid hit, there was more than a little uncertainty around the future. “We didn’t know if we were a band. Nobody knew if you were a band. So we just said, this is our band name forever.” After ultimately settling on a name and finding their own sound influenced by 2010s metalcore and looking to bring that into the modern day, they ultimately set about crafting their debut album, Weaponize Your Rage.
Balancing those two separate influences was certainly the initial goal. “When we bring in that older nostalgic sound, we still find certain things to make it feel like us,” Liv explains. “Tristan [Green, guitars] writes all our instrumentals and he has a great grasp on what newer sounds and trends are out there. He knows how to make sure the song is long enough to catch people’s attention, vocal placement, and it all depends on where the scene is going as a whole, too. It’s finding that right balance of what flows cohesively.”
The dual vocal approach also opens up avenues for them, not least because the two different timbres of their voices lets them embody different characters or play off against each other vocally. As Lizzie puts it, “I like to think of our voices as having different characters. We have cues in songs where we want certain elements.” Liv expands on that, saying that with their track Devil Left Me On Read that “we were almost going back and forth with our conscience” as the two vocal characters.
So where does ‘moancore’ figure into all this? Well, it’s part of their sense of humour – and it very nearly didn’t happen at all. “With Primitive, it was a last minute, on the fly thing,” begins Liv, “Tristan suggested doing a moan. I fought back so hard; I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want Lizzie to do it. But we did it, and Lizzie’s really good at making memes so she made eight different videos. It was hilarious!” As much as they like to prod and ragebait too, much like the moan did, and as they came up with various other pieces including Devil Left Me On Read’s titular line, there’s a serious side to the band.
“We want to showcase that you can use your anger and rage as a strength,” Liv says. “Mental health is a really important message for us.” Lizzie agrees, “you can look at your past and shape it into something positive for yourself.” Wrapping up, they explain that they want fans to be able to take solace in these songs; the humour is there to show another side to the band, but they want to share their own experiences in a way that lets their fans see themselves too.
Weaponize Your Rage is out now via Thriller Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS124 here:
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