Andy Cizek

Andy Cizek is the vocalist the internet discovered before the industry did — a Baltimore singer whose YouTube covers turned him into one of modern metal’s most in-demand voices. The breakout came in 2016, when Sumerian Records held open vocal auditions for a supergroup and Cizek’s original piece “The Current” tore through the competition. He didn’t win the spot — somehow — but hundreds of thousands of views later, the metal world knew his name. The industry had found its new favorite voice in the comments section.

Andrew Scott Cizek, born November 8, 1992 in Baltimore, Maryland, didn’t come out of nowhere; he came out of the local grind. He’d been playing in bands since high school, co-founding the alternative rock outfit WVNDER (initially Wander) in Frederick, Maryland in 2013 with guitarist Jack Rentschler, and cutting his teeth in projects like A Ghost in the Machine and Goner. The YouTube channel started as a side hustle — metalcore covers showcasing a genuinely absurd vocal range, cleans to screams without a seam — and became the main event. By the time the Sumerian audition video went viral, he’d already built the thing every label wanted: an audience.

The bands came calling in waves. In November 2017, with the release of the single “Control,” Cizek was unveiled as the new vocalist for Makari, the American rock band he’d bonded with while WVNDER toured alongside them. Then the big one: on July 1, 2019, British progressive metal giants Monuments announced the departure of vocalist Chris Barretto and tapped Cizek as their fill-in singer for the rest of the year’s touring. Three months later, on October 11, 2019, the fill-in tag came off — he was officially the voice of Monuments, one of the defining bands of the djent and modern prog-metal movement. For a kid from Baltimore who grew up idolizing this scene, it was the call-up.

But Cizek never put all the eggs in one basket, because Cizek doesn’t do baskets. In 2019 he launched Termina with fellow YouTuber and guitarist Nik Nocturnal — a modern metal project built for the internet era, independent, collaborative, and stacked with guests. By 2025 Termina had two full-length albums and a pile of singles to its name, with a guest list reading like a modern-metal fantasy draft: Phil Bozeman of Whitechapel and Joshua Travis of Emmure on “Parasocial,” Marcus Bridge of Northlane, Jason Richardson, Kyle Anderson of Brand Of Sacrifice on “Erase You,” Taylor Barber of Left To Suffer, Sean Harmanis of Make Them Suffer — and drumming from Chris Turner of Oceans Ate Alaska across the Soul Elegy record. The project is proof of what the Cizek brand enables: when your voice is the draw, the collaborations come to you.

The side quests kept multiplying. Corrode, an EP recorded in 2018 and released in 2022 by the prog project Dearest — Cizek on vocals, Lukas Guyader of ex-Intervals on guitar, Anup Sastry on drums. A vocal-coach practice and a YouTube presence that never stopped, now roughly 158,000 subscribers and pushing 20 million views. Twitch singing streams where the voice does the talking in real time. And in August 2024, the full-circle moment: post-hardcore legends A Lot Like Birds — a band that profoundly inspired the teenage Andy — announced him as their touring co-vocalist for the fall run. By October 2025, when the band released “When in Love” featuring Geoff Rickly of Thursday, their first official release in seven years, the video description confirmed it: Cizek was an official member of the lineup.

The Monuments chapter, meanwhile, hit pause — the band shelved for the time being over health concerns as of 2024 — which only underscores the Cizek model. He isn’t a singer waiting on one band’s schedule. He’s a vocalist as a platform: Monuments, Makari, Termina, WVNDER, Dearest, A Lot Like Birds, solo work, coaching, streaming. The throughline is the instrument — that versatile, unmistakable voice — and the distribution, which he built himself on YouTube long before the industry co-signed it.

Previously covers Andy Cizek because he’s the blueprint for the internet-first metal career: no gatekeeper discovered him, the comments did. From a Sumerian audition video to fronting half the modern metal scene at once, he turned a YouTube channel into a career most singers would kill for — one band at a time, until the bands started lining up. And he’s still uploading — the channel that started it all remains the home base, the place where the next chapter usually premieres first.