How KILLSWITCH ENGAGE rediscovered their “punk-rock, piss-and-vinegar” spirit for their first album in 6 years

“The last two months have been chaos,” exclaims Jesse Leach.

“Nothing bad,” the Killswitch Engage vocalist assures us with a laugh, “but between me getting married and the band touring in Australia and New Zealand, and playing the New England Metal and Hardcore Fest, and going down to Mexico [for the We Missed Ourselves Festival], it’s just been chaos. Yesterday was like the first day where I could just take a big exhale, and today I’m in a great mood.”

It’s late September when Revolver catches up with Leach in the mountains of upstate New York, where he’s luxuriating in some well-earned relaxation following the intense flurry of activity surrounding the celebration of his band’s 25th anniversary.

Nearly 3,000 miles away in San Diego, Killswitch guitarist and producer Adam Dutkiewicz is enjoying a similarly chill afternoon. “I just stuffed my face full of food,” he tells Revolver over the phone, as the wind chimes on his porch tinkle giddily in the background. “Rice and some greens fried up with some olive oil and garlic… When you get to be old, you try and stay away from eating hamburgers and hot dogs every day.” He chuckles.

But despite the idyllic nature of his present situation, an edge of impatience is detectable in Dutkiewicz’s voice. “I’m amped up and ready to go,” he admits. “I am ready to play some new stuff, because I’m tired of playing ‘The End of Heartache’ and ‘My Last Serenade’ every night, you know?”

It’s doubtful that Killswitch would ever actually boot two of their best-loved songs from their setlist, but there’s no question that it’s been a long time since the Massachusetts-spawned metalcore heroes have played any new material onstage. It’s already been over five years since 2019’s Atonement, the longest drought between albums in the band’s history. No wonder Dutkiewicz is feeling a little antsy.

Happily, for Killswitch Engage and their legion of fans alike, a new album is finally ready to see the light of day. Titled This Consequence, the band’s ninth full-length release — and their fourth since original singer Leach rejoined the group in 2012 — features 10 heart-punching, skin-flaying blasts of thrash and metallic hardcore, all topped by gloriously melodic outbursts from the guitar tandem of Dutkiewicz and Joel Stroetzel, driven by the powerhouse rhythm section of bassist Mike D’Antonio and drummer Justin Foley, and loaded with Leach’s soul-searing ruminations on the perilous present state of our planet’s population.

“This Consequence refers to the existential crisis humanity is in due to our conflict, divisions, war, deception, hatred and dire lack of compassion,” Leach explains. “It’s cause and effect. Every action has a reaction. It’s the nature of physics. In short, the title is a loose metaphor for a reckoning or a judgement day for us as a species.”

While it’s one of the strongest and most vibrant-sounding albums Killswitch Engage have ever produced, This Consequence almost didn’t make it to the finish line. Mirroring the record’s troubled themes, Killswitch faced some existential crises of their own during its creation.

To be fair, the extended delay between Killswitch albums wasn’t entirely the band’s fault. Their previous record, Atonement (the quintet’s first for Metal Blade after releasing six with Roadrunner), dropped a handful of months before the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. A major 2020 U.S. tour to support the album (with openers Light the Torch and August Burns Red, the former led by ex-Killswitch lead vocalist Howard Jones) had to be canceled after only two dates and wasn’t rescheduled until nearly two years later.

Work eventually began on what would become This Consequence in 2023 and bled into 2024 — though the writing and recording sessions (the latter of which largely undertaken at the band’s longtime home base of Mainline Recording in Westfield, Massachusetts, formerly known as Zing Studios) occasionally had to be set aside to accommodate touring and festival engagements, including this past fall’s Australian and New Zealand dates supporting Iron Maiden.

And then there were some unexpected holdups involving Leach. Already struggling to find his artistic voice in the new songs, the singer additionally found himself lacking his old power in front of the microphone — a situation that grew dire enough to make both Leach and Dutkiewicz question the band’s future, or at least Leach’s role in it.

“It was the most difficult record of my career, both lyrically and sonically” the singer says now. “There was a time in the middle of recording this record where both Adam and I were like, ‘I don’t know what to do — this is not working.’”

“There was a quick moment,” Dutkiewicz admits, “where I was thinking, Are we gonna have to get a new singer?”

Everything had started off so well, too. After having written and recorded much of Atonement (and 2016’s Incarnate) remotely, the band convened at a rehearsal space in Easthampton, Massachusetts, to work on the new material together.

“We still wrote songs on our own and came up with ideas and emailed them to each other,” Dutkiewicz explains. “But we decided to jam them together in the same room so everyone could have their say. That way, you can get a vibe check on everybody’s response to an idea. Instead of just reading an email thread where everybody’s, like, ‘Yeah, this is cool, blah blah,’ there’s something to be said about being able to read somebody’s body language. When they just grab the bucket and throw up into it, you’re like, ‘I guess that song’s not gonna make the cut!’”

“Massachusetts just feels like home for the band, even though three of us don’t even live there anymore,” says Leach. (D’Antonio and Stroetzel are the only members of Killswitch who still reside in the band’s home state.) “There are still all these places there that we have always gone to, like the Student Prince, this old German restaurant in Springfield where we like to hang out. And I think New England in general really has a lot to do with our sound, our attitude towards music and our vibe — the sarcasm, the busting balls, all that stuff that goes with the culture is ingrained into this band. I think working in Massachusetts just kind of keeps us humble.”

Leach, who was present at most of the writing sessions, initially had difficulty coming up with lyrics for the new material. “We did a tour with Lamb of God [in late 2022],” he says. “That’s when we were really starting to kick into high gear with the record, and I remember having the demos with me and trying to work on the lyrics on the road, which never really works for me. I usually have to be in a certain type of headspace to do that. I wrote about six or eight songs where the guys were like, ‘No, this isn’t working. These lyrics are cheesy.’”

Leach says he was trying to apply the positive mental attitude he’d cultivated as a survival technique during the pandemic to his lyrics — an approach which, he realizes in retrospect, didn’t fit the confrontational vibe of the music. “I’d call it ‘toxic positivity,’” he says with a laugh. “But the term the guys came up with was ‘Dad Advice Songs.’ As soon as I heard that term, I was like, ‘OK, I get it. I know what you’re saying.’”

“I had to dig back into my revolutionary mindset that I’d sort of put on the shelf during the pandemic,” Leach continues. “Because during the pandemic, I felt like the person I needed to be for my friends and my family was a gracious, kind person. My own family was really divided on the subject of vaccines, and the amount of ugly things that were being said between people who disagreed on this point for whatever reasons was shocking to me. I didn’t want to be part of the debate. I wanted people just to respect each other and treat each other well — and try to do what’s good for the greater good of humanity. And with this album, I wanted to throw my arms around the world and help bring them out of this dark time that we all still have PTSD from…

“I also think I kind of lost a little bit of myself during the pandemic, because I was like, ‘Well, if I’m not doing things with the band, and I’m just a sort of normal Joe trying to get by, then who am I?’ So I had to sort of relearn myself again, and get some of that punk-rock piss-and-vinegar back for writing this record.”

Unfortunately, Leach’s initial attempts to reconnect with his inner punk rage produced lyrics that sounded way too familiar to his bandmates. “The guys gave me a whole list of words that I wasn’t allowed to use this time.” He laughs. “It was like, ‘Don’t use any fire analogies. Don’t use too many nautical references…’”

“Jesse was reusing a lot of old ideas and topics and themes, and we were kind of gently pointing it out to him,” confirms Dutkiewicz. “And, you know, I’ll give it to him — he was very responsive about it, and he took all the criticism the best he could have. And it’s great that we have a singer that’s willing to start from scratch and take an idea and throw it away, because he was bad with that in the past. He had a tendency to think that everything he made was awesome. He was very prideful about everything he wrote, and I never want to hurt his pride.

“At the same time, you need to be able to have quality control, and I think he embraced that this session. It was great to be able to just tell him the honest truth, and be like, ‘Man, what are you getting at with this song? This ain’t working — just start over.’”

Leach’s lyrical breakthrough finally happened once he started writing from outside of his own perspective. “Some of these songs are not about me at all,” he explains. “Some of them started out as me observing a situation or listening to somebody talk about what they went through, and just sort of journaling it. A lot of this shit had nothing to do with me at first, and then morphed into me going, ‘Oh, I can see myself in this story, so I’m gonna change the wording.’ But it was all about taking myself out of the equation at first in order to tell a better story.”

“Broken Glass,” the penultimate song on This Consequence, was Leach’s first attempt at this writing approach. “That song is about somebody overcoming abuse and getting revenge on their abuser,” he says. “I used to do a podcast called Stoke the Fire, which was predominantly about mental health and recovery, and I was pulling ideas for the song from all these horrible stories I heard on the podcast. The idea was about how people’s words can really tear at you and create trauma, using the analogy of shards of broken glass. It’s kind of dark, but that was the first song where the band was like, ‘That! Whatever you’re doing, more of that!’ So I was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna come from a dark, angry, frustrated place and write from there.’”

This fresh approach also resulted in “Abandon Us,” the album’s breakneck opening track, and the death metal-ish “The Fall of Us,” both of which deal with emotional betrayal — though the betrayal could just as easily be political as personal. “I like to write in a way where the song can be about more than one thing,” Leach says. “I think that’s the beauty of art: If you write with a broad enough brushstroke, people can gather their own sort of story from it.

“But there’s also kind of a narrative that runs through these songs and this record about the corruption of the powers that be,” he continues. “Humanity is divided by tribalism, warfare, all that stuff that we’ve had from day one — and which, unfortunately, I do believe will continue on as long as there are people in power doing what they’re doing to us. Until people realize the power that we have, we’re going to continue to be manipulated. And that’s the consequence of our actions, but it’s also the consequence of our inaction as people, right?”

Which is not to say that the positivity Leach originally hoped to bring to This Consequence doesn’t come shining through at times — particularly in the triumphant “Aftermath,” the pounding “Forever Aligned” and the defiant closing track, “Requiem.” “‘Aftermath’ is about going through a really difficult time, and pulling the pieces of your life back together and figuring out where to go from there,” he says. “It’s like, you can’t give into despair. You’ve got to pick yourself up and keep moving. That’s what life’s all about.

“We worked together for a lot of the record, but ‘Aftermath’ was one that Justin wrote later in the process and sent it over,” he continues. “As soon as I heard that chorus, I started jotting down words — within a half hour, I had written the song, demoed it and sent it right back. And the guys were like, ‘Holy shit, one-day turnaround? That’s totally making the record!’ That was a magical one, a moment where I was like, ‘We’re gonna be OK— this is a fucking hit!’”

Leach’s songwriting breakthrough produced an immense sense of relief for all concerned, but it was unfortunately short-lived. Once the album’s instrumental tracks were laid down to everyone’s satisfaction, Leach stepped into the vocal booth — only to find himself suddenly struggling to sing effectively, a daunting development that sent him into a spiral of self-doubt and left his bandmates puzzled.

The issue went back to the vocal nodule surgery that Leach had undergone in 2018. To limit further wear and tear on his throat after his recovery, he learned the vocal fry singing technique. “It’s kind of a cheat way to sound like you’re screaming,” Dutkiewicz explains. “It uses less of your vocal cords, and it kept his voice strong when we were on tour. But he brought that technique to the studio, and right from the beginning, it didn’t sound right. It didn’t sound powerful. He sounded like a completely different singer to me, and the entire band was like, ‘What is going on here?’”

“Live, I can pull it off and make it sound good,” says Leach. “But it didn’t fly in the studio. It was kind of screechy, as opposed to the full-bodied, old-school way of doing it. I actually got super depressed making this record, thinking, Is it over? Am I done? Do I suck? I was still rewriting a bunch of stuff, too, so it was kind of a false start.”

Even after collaborating on five previous Killswitch albums, starting with the band’s 2000 self-titled debut, and recording two more full-lengths with their side project Times of Grace, Leach and Dutkiewicz weren’t clicking in the studio. Both musicians were becoming increasingly frustrated by Leach’s subpar vocal performances. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with the record if we kept it the way it was,” says Dutkiewicz.

“I felt like a failure as a writer and a singer,” Leach adds. “And Adam felt like a failure as a producer, because he couldn’t figure out what my problem was, or how to get me back on track. I’ll never forget — we were sharing an Airbnb, and he was out in the back porch, just sitting there pounding beers with this bummed-out look on his face. I just knew he was drowning in sorrow, and there was nothing I could do about it. So there was a really dark period in the middle of this.”

After a heart-to-heart talk with Dutkiewicz, Leach took a few weeks off from recording to get his head together. A consultation with his vocal coach Melissa Cross motivated him to try blending his old way of singing with his new technique.

“It’s hard to explain,” says Leach, “but I learned to use more of my ‘head’ voice for the screams and growls — and even the death-metal stuff. And it just clicked. I started going for long drives out here in the Catskills in my truck, sing-ng along to bands like Edge of Sanity and early Opeth. It was like, Oh, I’m doing this — and I’m not even shredded after doing it for an hour!”

Three weeks later, Leach pronounced himself ready to return to the studio. “We got into the room together,” he remembers, “I started singing, and Adam just spun around in his chair and looked at me, like, There it is! Fucking goddammit, where have you been? It was a really powerful moment. I wound up redoing the vocals on eight songs, and I think some of the best vocals I’ve ever done for Killswitch are on this record.”

After hearing This Consequence, one can’t help but agree with Leach’s assessment — as well as acknowledge that it’s one of Killswitch’s finest albums to date, which is no small feat for a band with such acknowledged classics as 2002’s Alive or Just Breathing and 2004’s The End of Heartache under their belt.

“It’s just us doing what we do,” says Dutkiewicz, modestly. “We’ve always had a sound to what we are, so we weren’t trying to be like, Hey, let’s make a completely different-sounding record that’s like nothing we’ve ever done before! I think we were just writing songs that we could hopefully feel good about, and that would stoke out our fans at the end of the day. Because obviously, without our fans, we can’t do our job. We just owe them everything.”

But the album’s quality — and indeed, its very existence — is also a testament to the strength of the band members’ enduring emotional bond, as exemplified by their loving support of Leach when things were looking bleak. “The guys, some of them gently and some of them not so gently, made me sort of knuckle up by saying, ‘We know you can do better than this,’” Leach remembers. “And I’m so grateful that they did that, because the final result is something I’m super proud of. I give a lot of credit to those guys for handling me and my little lead singer ego the best they could.”

This Consequence is also another brilliant reflection of the perpetual yin-yang relationship between Leach and Dutkiewicz.

“People call us ‘The Odd Couple,’” Leach says with a laugh. “Onstage, he’s super goofy, and I’m sincere. In the studio, he’s very serious, focused and logical, and I’m sort of an emotional wreck — a hardcore Tasmanian Devil. But we sharpen each other, and he refines all the flaws that I have. For us to come out the other side of this record feeling victorious — like we’ve still got this — is a very powerful thing. I can’t imagine doing what I do with anyone else.”