KILLSWITCH ENGAGE

THE HAMMER INTERVIEW

He’s the son of a preacher man who went from hardcore Christianity to metalcore stardom with Killswitch Engage, and this is his life story so far

WORDS: STEPHEN HILL • PICTURES: TRAVIS SHINN

PRESS/TRAVIS SHINN

There aren’t many vocalists in the worlds of metal and hardcore like Jesse Leach. The Killswitch Engage frontman couldn’t be further away from the stereotypical metalcore tough guy. For one thing, he’s calling Hammer via Zoom not from a big city apartment but from his new home, tucked away in the woodlands in the Catskill Mountains, upstate New York.

“I can be alone here, in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I need to be close to nature.”

Born in 1978 to a religious family that moved around the US, Jesse found his calling in the fertile late-90s Massachusetts hardcore scene. After playing in a series of local bands, he co-founded metalcore trailblazers Killswitch Engage in 1999, only to quit just after the release of their breakthrough second album, 2002’s Alive Or Just Breathing. He spent a decade away from the band, but made an unexpected – and triumphant – return to Killswitch in 2012.

He’s in a philosophical mood today, a few weeks ahead of the release of Killswitch’s new album, This Consequence. His journey has seen him go from young kid raised in a strict Christian family to one of the most recognisable, committed frontmen around. It’s a story that takes in questions of faith, mental health and an unexpected love of ambient techno.

What was your upbringing like?

“For the most part I had a pretty damn good childhood. My parents did a great job of masking our poverty from us. But a lot of my childhood was just three times a week at church. My father was studying to be a minister, so when I was very young, it was a lot of travelling to different churches, him and my mom trying to find the right spiritual home for us.”

How did that affect you as a child?

“My brain was filled at a very young age with a lot of knowledge and Christian indoctrination. I often joke that my brother and I were like the Flanders kids from The Simpsons . My parents would wind us up with religious fervour and we’d go to, like, a family party or Christmas, and we’d be calling out our uncle for living in sin because he wasn’t married to the woman he was with. Just really cringeworthy shit when you’re four or five years old.”