From Manila to Brooklyn

Inigo was eight when he first picked up the guitar. That was almost two decades ago. Now he's in Brooklyn, building a sound that doesn't officially exist yet.

GNZ is what he goes by on stage and in the studio. Club Metal is the sound he's been chasing: equal parts heavy metal, hardcore punk, and whatever keeps people on a dance floor at 2 am when their feet should've given out an hour ago. The pitch isn't subtle. The name says everything.

The bass drop is almost beside the point. What GNZ is really after is harder to engineer: a room where nobody's background is the price of entry, where people can shed whatever they walked in carrying and just exist together for a few hours.

"That's what Club Metal is for," he says. "Anyone, from any background; you come here, you leave all of it at the door, and you connect."

The mosh pit, in his own words, is not just about the chaos, it’s about unifying people together. 

Raised on Music

GNZ's musical education started young and moved fast. By thirteen, he'd discovered GarageBand on his phone and began experimenting with arrangements and recording fundamentals. As soon as he turned 17, he knew that production was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life and that he should start taking it seriously. 

After years of honing his craft, GNZ realized that he wanted to do more than simply build a career in music. He was driven to push the boundaries of his artistic potential and pursue growth on a much larger scale. In 2022, he took a life-changing leap, leaving his hometown in the Philippines and moving to the United States to earn a Master’s degree in Songwriting and Production from Berklee College of Music.

Moving to a new country and rebuilding from scratch wasn't easy. "The cultural differences, distance from family, and experience of rebuilding my personal and professional network from the ground up often left me feeling isolated during my early years in the city," he reflects. But isolation, for a certain kind of creative, eventually becomes material.

The Studio, the Sound, and the Scene

GNZ's home base is ANTVGONIST Studios, a Brooklyn recording and production house he co-developed with rapper and producer LetOutThePressure (Katrell Clay). The studio operates on a deliberate philosophy: no chasing trends, no recycling what already exists. Artists come there to figure out what makes them different and then build everything around that.

This space suits GNZ's own creative instincts well. His signature is the electric guitar, used as a production tool that can push into EDM, hip-hop, R&B, and pop just as comfortably as it can through metal and hardcore. That flexibility has made him a producer in demand across genres. His credits include work for Andrea Turk, whose track Call Me on Drugs, which he produced, earned him a Finalist placement in the 2025 International Songwriting Competition in both the Rock and Unpublished categories, as well as BXPOLAR, Chloe Tang, and Dotia, among others.

Building Something That Doesn't Have a Name Yet

The hardest part of pioneering a genre, GNZ will tell you, is that people can't hear what they haven't imagined yet. Club Metal sits at an intersection that most listeners have never encountered: the aggression of hardcore punk, the community ritual of rave culture, the low-end physics of bass music, and the instinct for many is to call it an impossibility before giving it a chance.

"Innovation needs people to imagine something before there is proof that it can succeed," he says. He's learned to be patient with that. He's also learned that a genre isn't built through conviction alone but through records, through live shows, through the slow accumulation of a community that recognizes something in the sound before they can articulate what it is.

That community is beginning to coalesce. GNZ is part of both the hardcore and underground electronic music worlds in New York, two scenes that have been quietly converging for years. A live event is in the works for mid-2026, through a collective being built around the same sound and culture he's developing. Details remain close to the chest for now, but the direction is clear: Club Metal is meant to be experienced in a room, with a crowd, bodies in motion.

The Longer Arc

None of this was ever really about genre. What GNZ has been building, through every move, every degree, every late night in the studio, is something closer to a philosophy. Club Metal is the most visible expression of it: a space where the usual divisions don't hold, where the crowd is the point as much as the music. It’s about letting people finally express themselves through the chaos of the mosh pit. 

"Music hits hardest when it pulls people together across every kind of difference." He's said it before, and he'll say it again, because for him it hasn't changed. It's in the club, and it's in the records. It’s the reason he took a leap of faith and got on a plane to New York, Manila to Brooklyn. GarageBand to Berklee to ANTVGONIST Studios. The path looks winding from the outside. From where he's standing, it was always a straight line, back to an eight-year-old holding his first guitar, already paying attention.

He just needed the city to catch up.

Rather than keeping his unfinished demos in the vault like what many artists do, he is giving the public full access to his Untitled playlist. 

“By making my Untitled Playlist public, people who follow it will not just get an early preview of what Club Metal is about to be, they will also witness the genre’s growth in real time as I continuously update each track and upload new demos.”

View GNZ’s Club Metal Untitled Playlist here.