Armed with barnstorming single Forever Aligned, Killswitch Engage are back at it again with new album This Consequence. In a world-exclusive first interview with Kerrang!, frontman Jesse Leach and guitarist Adam D lift the lid on their ninth LP, overcoming their personal struggles, the impossible power of love, and why division is never the answer…
Remember last year, when people started asking how often men think about the Roman Empire? Well, as it turns out, Jesse Leach ponders it a lot.
Particularly when Killswitch Engage’s frontman is discussing the band’s forthcoming ninth studio album, This Consequence – a brutal opus examining everything from mental health to toxic relationships to love being the most compelling evidence for the existence of a higher power. At its heart, though, the record takes stock of the troubling state of the world – of conflict and corruption, where divisions are engendered by governments and the media to prevent resolutions, thereby keeping the fat cats rich and the rest of us distracted.
Even a cursory scan through This Consequence’s lyrics reveals an album that kicks against the pricks with steel toe capped boots on, from opening track Abandon Us (‘Untrusting of the promise of a figurehead to lead / When they've broken all their promises and left us here to bleed’) to Discordant Nation (‘Kill all your sympathy in this discordant nation / Yield to and bend the knee to this discordant nation / Creating a nation that's controlled by fear and alienation’) to Collusion (‘The revolution can't be contained by a fascist system enslaved to the belief that resistance will fade’).
“You can even go back to the Roman Empire – using religion, using politics, bread and circuses, the gladiators, all that stuff. I think it's just drilled into society,” explains Adam D. “I think, unfortunately, the way that human society is built, the way that the power struggle is, there’s never going to be a moment in history where we’re sitting in a utopia without war, without greed, without all those things that make humanity what it is.
“And I think a lot of people are just dicks,” he adds, succinctly.
These wholly different appraisals of the same situation feel appropriate given that the two bandmates are on opposite sides of the U.S. today, some 2,750 miles apart in fact, with Adam in California and Jesse in his temporary home in New York. They join the conversation at varying times too; Adam, 47, is on the dot and fizzing with enthusiasm, while Jesse, a year younger at 46, is late and sounding rattled, having accidentally put the interview in his calendar for 3am rather than 3pm – an oversight he blames on the “absolute chaos” of the past two months.
“I’ve been dogging you while you haven’t been here,” Adam tells Jesse once he arrives. “I’ve been talking about how you were a pain in my ass this whole recording process.”
“And here I am 20 minutes late,” winces Jesse.
“See what I gotta deal with!”
While Adam is joking, there is some truth behind the chain-yanking. You see, before KSE could musically explore the shit sandwich we’re all being force-fed, as well as the historic precedents for these problems, the band first had to overcome challenges in their own camp – specifically in relation to Jesse, who experienced a crisis of confidence.
“In retrospect, it was a necessary growing pain for me as a writer and as an artist,” explains the vocalist of having to constantly re-do demos until they passed muster. “And as somebody who’s learning to throw away art. I think I hold stuff too precious and the whole process [of making This Consequence] really taught me to let go of my ideas.”
“You get into a habit of thinking that everything you write is great because everything is heartfelt,” Adam says to Jesse. “But when we opened your eyes to the fact that certain things felt watered down and we made you rewrite the song, you admitted that it was way better.”
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘great’,” clarifies Jesse. “I think I just get attached, emotionally. I’d say I rewrote eight songs, lyrically, and one of them I had to rewrite three or four times.”
While the rest of KSE – guitarist Joel Stroetzel, bassist Mike D’Antonio and drummer Justin Foley – were unvarnished in their criticism of Jesse’s initial offerings, leaving the frontman’s ego “a little bruised”, Adam, who’s once again in the producer’s seat, employed more tact.
“On one song he said the lyrics sounded like dad advice,” recalls Jesse of a particularly astute piece of feedback. “I thought that was very funny.”
“And I was right,” laughs Adam.
“The whole process of making This Consequence really taught me to let go of my ideas”
It helped, of course, that Adam is no stranger to creative hiccups. During the making of KSE’s second self-titled record, their last with former frontman Howard Jones, who was experiencing health difficulties after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, things reached a low point.
“A lot of that had to do with interpersonal issues and everything that was going on with Howard,” recalls Adam. “The band was unhappy with where we were with the record and having an outside producer [Brendan O’Brien] was really awkward. It was the one record in particular where we all felt we weren’t vibing the right way.”
Even at the moment, Adam is in the midst of mixing a project – with Howard, funnily enough – and admits to finding it “self-torture” to mix a record he’s also producing. “It’s like I hate myself or something,” he explains. “I’ve literally driven myself nuts with guitar and bass tone possibilities. I’m just at a point of frustration. I’m that stubborn idiot who presses on and just makes the project worse, but the only thing that fixes that problem is to walk away for some time, then when you come back to it, you have a fresh perspective, having not thought about it.”
That wasn’t an option during the making of This Consequence, though, as Killswitch needed to make up for lost time; this is, after all, the band’s first offering in six years, and the longest they’ve gone without releasing a record since they started out. Much of this blame can be laid at the door of COVID-19, of course. Having released Atonement, in 2019 – “The worst time possible,” according to Adam – their U.S. tour in support of it was curtailed by the pandemic, two shows in. It was during this period, separated from his family with nothing to do, and suffering with a recurrence of his long-term back problem, that Adam began to spiral mentally. Having made a record with his other band, Times Of Grace [2021’s Songs Of Loss And Separation], and recommenced touring with KSE, Adam was able to steady his ship, so even better placed to support Jesse, who had been plagued by self-doubt on Atonement, too.
“Adam’s a great producer,” says Jesse. “He knows I’m a sensitive little flower. He knows how to handle me because he’s seen me in the studio, having total meltdowns. At the time, I was giving these guys my best and it wasn’t doing anything. I really had a moment there. I remember going for a long walk in the woods and thinking to myself, ‘Shit, dude, is this it?’”
“I wasn’t worried about your lyrics,” Adam tells Jesse now, throwing a curveball. “I was worried about your vocals. I was like, ‘Crap – we’ve got to get a new singer!’”
The ninth of This Consequence’s 10 tracks is called Broken Glass – a maelstrom of slow, serrated guitars, pummelling death metal drumming and Jesse in Jekyll and Hyde mode, his vocals flitting between bloodied roar and yearning harmonies.
There was a time, early in the process, when unleashing efforts like this took a debilitating toll on Jesse’s voice, further shaking his confidence given his hang-ups about writing. But while the latter problem was remedied by reading Buddhist literature and science fiction to calm his brain during sleepless nights, not to mention watching films both serious (1984) and tongue-in-cheek (the 1997 satirical black comedy, Wag The Dog), the vocal issue brought back past anxieties and required more of a trial and error approach.
Jesse, who had surgery to remove polyps from his vocal cords in 2018, subsequently reduced how much he hung out with his bandmates to minimise his need to speak, while working only two hours a day to avoid fatigue. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he leaned in harder to his older vocal technique while blending it with his new one, the vocal fry – the specific sound quality produced by the movement of the vocal folds.
“That’s when it all clicked,” Jesse says with audible relief. “But not without some severe growing pains.”
The creation of Broken Glass, according to Jesse, was the point he knew everything was going to be alright. Despite starting with the intention of writing lyrics for a positive, uplifting record in keeping with the upbeat nature of KSE’s live shows, the arrival of Broken Glass and the encouraging feedback it elicited from his bandmates caused the frontman to flip the script.
“When that song was done and we all sat and listened to it, everybody was like, ‘More of that… be pissed off,’” he recalls. “So that shifted gears for me. I thought, ‘If these guys like this, there’s plenty more where that came from!’ So I went dark. I got angry. I thought about betrayal.”
Unlike Adam, who hasn’t listened to This Consequence since he approved the mixes, Jesse has frequently dived back in, analysing the shifting meanings behind several of its songs. So while, on the surface, Broken Glass is seemingly about betrayal (‘Strip away my confidence to prey upon the kindness that's in me’), it’s actually about self-love and the revenge that comes with walking away from an abuser (‘Now I watch as you collapse’).
“All this horrible, negative stuff we continue to see, I use that as fuel to discuss anger and division, but also use it to say that we’re better than that”
Love informs Forever Aligned, the first single and a song that burst forth from Jesse so naturally that he barely recalls how quickly it all came together. He does know, however, that it was inspired by his second wife, Corinne Paris aka Porphyra Philia, who previously guested on the track The Path from his ambient side-project The Way Back Within.
“She has been a huge inspiration for a lot,” says Jesse. “She watched me spiral out of control while making this record, sitting with my darkness. She was with me every step of the way, encouraging me and telling me it was going to be okay.” Its lyrics, which include the line ‘A part of me only you could see / To save this wretched wounded man from all-consuming grief’ certainly give credence to this.
While the starting point for Forever Aligned was the love Jesse has for his wife, as well as his mother – “The kind of love that you can’t touch” – it gave way to a bigger exploration of love as an essential light to illuminate the darkness. Like Adam, Jesse experienced a great deal of frustration and unhappiness during the pandemic – not just because he, like so many others, was stuck within four walls, but because the discourse around coronavirus, government responses and even whether or not to have the vaccine were new avenues for division.
And then, in May 2020, just two months after the spread of the disease was classified as a pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin brought racial tensions into sharper global focus.
“Warfare, police brutality, all this horrible, negative stuff we were seeing and continue to see, I use that as fuel to discuss anger and division, but also use it to say that we’re better than that,” explains Jesse. “We’ve got more in common than we do differences as human beings.”
One of those things we have in common is, of course, love – an emotion that the rather spiritual Jesse suggests is the closest thing to a deity we have. “You wonder what life is all about,” the singer says of the existential dread that often comes with being alive. “I’ve never really lost the hope that there was something better out there, something greater than we see in the physical realm. Love between humans is the closest I think we can get to such a thing as god or a great spirit or something that’s far beyond us.”
Meanwhile, Aftermath finds him documenting mental health one again (‘But you can't give in to despair’), something he has well-documented experiences of and revisited throughout Killswitch’s career. Does he do this to reiterate that it’s something that ebbs and flows, but is never fully resolved?
“You go through phases,” agrees Jesse. “It’s not doom and gloom all the time. It’s not like you’re suicidal all the time. There are going to be good days and bad days, and I think that reflects from song to song, album to album.”
Because of this, some entries in their discography are harder to revisit than others. “I can think back to where I was mentally while writing [2016’s seventh album] Incarnate when I listen to it, and can hear a lot of darkness. But it’s important to remember that it’s not something that just goes away, or something you can cure. It’s something you have to learn to live with and has nuances to it. There are going to be months where you might be in a really bad place, then there are going to be times when you almost forget the struggle because you’re doing so well.”
While This Consequence features all the hallmarks of Killswitch Engage – heaviness and lyrical depth chief among them – it was made in a markedly different way to its predecessor. Writing and production work on their previous record was done separately and remotely, resulting in an offering replete with songs written by certain band members, leading to some feeling understandably disappointed to have their roles reduced to turning up and play parts written by someone else.
For this one, though, for the first time since 2002’s second album Alive Or Just Breathing, the band hashed out everything together in the same room – a Massachusetts rehearsal space. “It’s something I didn’t really take into consideration last time around,” admits Adam. “It really is important for all the band members to have the ability to insert little pieces of their personalities with the songs while writing them. So while there are still songs written by one band member, we all got to play them together, so if something didn’t feel right for anyone, they could rewrite bits themselves.”
Given that it had been a while since they’d worked like this, was there any rust? Not for men approaching 50 well-versed in how they do and don’t want to work, says Adam. “It was as easy as pie,” the guitarist grins. “We all came in with our homework, so we weren’t putzing around waiting for somebody to randomly come up with something. We came in and just banged through stuff. It was about efficiency. It’s better when you’re in a forward motion.”
Things weren’t as productive making Alive Or Just Breathing back in the early 2000s. “We wouldn’t talk about any of the stuff beforehand,” recalls Adam. “We used to just piss around and waste a bunch of time, sometimes walking away from jam sessions with absolutely nothing.”
So, would they work like this again – taking the environment of their youth and bringing their older men’s mastery of process to it?
Adam is all-in. “I think it did something really good for everybody’s head,” he enthuses of making This Consequence. “And everyone’s a lot more invested in the songs.”
And what about Jesse? Would he repeat the experience of being subjected to such scrutiny, given the hardships it led to?
“I look back on it and it’s made me a better songwriter and a better singer,” he says decisively, tugging at that silver lining. “It’s my entire career, what I’ve learned from working with Adam, and it’s something I would never change…”
This Consequence is released February 21, 2025 via Metal Blade.
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