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.
- “I would hide out before the show, play the set, hide out after, not be sociable, not have fun, and that just started wearing thin on me”: Jesse Leach explains his 2002 Killswitch Engage exit
- “Some of the people I thought were good were actually bad. I felt a lot of betrayal and uncertainty”: Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach explains the trauma and anger behind new album This Consequence
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.”
Were you allowed to listen to music?
“No. No secular music allowed in the house, no secular TV. I could only watch one show a week, and movies and cassette tapes had to be screened if they came into the house. My parents would read the lyrics first. I didn’t break out of that until we eventually moved into public schools and started to co-mingle with the secular world. That was when things really started to change for me.”
What was the first music to really make an impression on you during that time?
“People might chuckle over this, but it’s true and I still love him today: Phil Collins was the first guy that I was allowed to listen to, because he was on popular radio in the 80s. When I would sneak to my friends’ houses and see MTV, the first glimpses I had was stuff like Phil Collins. That was the initial, ‘Oh, I like this guy. He’s on the radio.’ Def Leppard would have been the next one – Hysteria was the biggest thing in the world in 1987 for me.”
When did you start discovering heavier music?
“My brother brought home a couple of tapes – he smuggled them in! One of them was Anthrax’s I’m The Man and the other was [Iron Maiden’s] The Number Of The Beast. We were aged 10 or 11, and my parents would leave my brother and I at home to go to a Bible thing. We didn’t have to go anymore, thankfully – we’d stay home and do our homework. The moment they would leave, those cassette tapes would go into the boombox and we would sing word for word.”
Presumably The Number Of The Beast would be the last thing your parents would want to discover you listening to!
“Exactly! Fast forward to a couple of weeks later, my mother’s cleaning my brother’s room, lifting the mattress – back then the mattress was the place to hide all your stuff – and she finds it. During that time, with Satanic Panic, we knew the worst thing in the world you could do was bring in The Number Of The Beast. My dad took the tape in front of us, put it on the ground and smashed it: ‘I’m forbidding Devil’s music in my house!’ But that only made it more appealing.”
When did you start to question that religious upbringing?
“I was old enough where I was like, ‘OK, now I’m skateboarding with my friends, now I’m listening to punk rock.’ I dove deep into that community instead of going to church and Bible studies every week. I realised that all of that is based on what a human is writing and saying. If God is greater than all of that, how are we capturing that energy, that spirit, and homogenising it and translating it into words that other people can understand without completely reducing what the Great Spirit god energy is like? Faith is a beautiful thing. I have faith too. But it’s not connected to a certain belief system.”
So discovering punk rock changed everything for you?
“Yeah. Punk and hardcore is when I was like, ‘This is me. I can identify with this.’ I’ll never forget the first time hearing Minor Threat – it blew my mind. I didn’t even understand what was happening. I knew Metallica, but Minor Threat was different. It was angry, fast, pissed off, and when I honed in on the lyrics, it was like, ‘Oh, they’re talking about like bettering yourself, being free from alcohol and drugs’ – stuff that I had already thought as an indoctrinated Christian kid. It felt very righteous to me. That’s when I started to see the counterculture that was happening, and that’s when I started to lean more towards that way.”
When did you start your first band?
“Probably not even six months on from hearing Minor Threat. I had two friends that were into punk, and we started a band called Departure, and played our first show at a Halloween party in 1993. We covered Unsung by Helmet and Seeing Red by Minor Threat, and then had six originals. I still have the cassette tape somewhere. It’s awful, but it was the first time where I was like, ‘This is it. There’s nothing cooler than this.’”
How quickly did you integrate into the hardcore scene?
“I was going to four local shows a week. My mom, to her credit, would drop me off at the clubs to see some of these bands because she saw that it really made me feel alive. I heard bands like Bad Brains, 7 Seconds, Youth Of Today, Earth Crisis, Strife, Unbroken. These were bands that had a really uplifting, positive message, and that kind of is what really sunk its teeth into me. I was like, ‘This is it. Son of a preacher man is now a punk rock singer.’ It was my religion.”
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Were you aware of how special that Massachusetts hardcore scene was?
“I look back on that and it was the glory days for me. Even before Killswitch, Adam [Dutkiewicz, lead guitar] and Joe [Stroetzel, rhythm guitar] were in Aftershock, Mike [D’Antonio, bass] was in Overcast, you had a band like Candiria who mixed jazz and death metal. If it wasn’t for that scene then I wouldn’t even be here.”
Killswitch really put the scene on the global map with Alive Or Just Breathing. Was it weird getting all that attention?
“I knew it was definitely blowing up. We went from playing to 30, 40, 50 people in the local scene to playing very large rooms, having people travel distances to see us. The moment we got signed and things started to happen, that’s when people wanted my autograph. People wanted to grab a picture with me and it was like, ‘What? That’s wild.’ It started to build social anxiety within me. I started to dread it.”
And that’s what led to your departure from the band?
“Yeah. Back then, I was a very insecure, social anxiety-ridden kid, who didn’t have a total handle on my art. I started to get depressed. My anxiety was crippling me. I would hide out before the show, play the set, hide out after, not be sociable, not have fun, and that just started wearing thin on me. I felt very alone, I was having a rough time with my voice and my mental health. I became pretty much suicidal. I had the wherewithal at least to bail and get out of there. It sucked. I wish I would have done it better, but I knew no other way. Survival mode kicked in.”
That was in an era where discussions around mental health were far less common as well…
“I did hold my cards close to my chest for a long time. Honestly, I was finding myself in the bottom of bottles, just drinking and numbing it, not even really being that self-aware. By the time I did come around to wanting to talk about it, I was just desperate for answers.”
How did you address it?
“I remember going on my Myspace and posting a photo of me in the mirror, not looking that great, and saying, ‘From now on, I’m going to start talking about this. I’m not OK and I want to hear from you, let’s talk about this. Reach out.’ I got people calling me a pussy and whatever. You kind of weave through all that, then you see the gems, the comments of someone who’s like, ‘I’m a firefighter… a big, tough guy… I’ve got issues. Thank you so much for speaking out.’ This empowers me to want to talk more about it and that narrative.”
How have you learnt to cope with those issues over the years?
“For the most part, it’s my muse. You learn how to live with it. You exercise certain techniques and thought patterns, and there’s so many things you can do to sort of live with mental disorders. If I’m going through a bout of depression, I can write some pretty intense stuff.”
Is there any specific music that helps you in those low moments?
“My favourite group of all time is [UK electronica duo] The Orb. I listen to The Orb more than I do anything. It’s music for mental health. They help anti-anxiety me. Everyone has that band that they put on or that song when you need to just come back to reality. If I’m not in a good place, I’ll have The Orb on constantly. And that’s my happy place.”
Was it hard to see Killswitch get so big after you left?
“I was happy for those dudes and I knew they were getting big. But to be completely honest, I wanted nothing to do with that scene. I turned away from all that stuff and started getting into stoner rock and doom, smoking weed and drinking. It was like, ‘Let me get as far away from this as I can.’ So when I did tap in and check them out, I’m like, ‘Holy shit, these guys are getting big!’”
Did you ever go and see them with your replacement, Howard Jones?
“I remember watching a clip of Killswitch playing a show, and I was like, ‘Dude, this is ridiculous. These guys are huge!’ So I put on a disguise – a big, old, hooded sweatshirt and a knit cap – and went to go see them play. I was happy for them. I didn’t feel jealous. I felt a little dumb, that it was kind of a dumb move to leave, but I knew that I had to do it and I was happy for those guys.”
How did you get back into that scene?
“Fast forward to a few years later, I’m in a band called Seemless, and I started touring again. The van that Killswitch had – a black Ford Econoline, the van that I suffered in, had mental breakdowns, anxiety – Seemless had bought from Killswitch Engage to tour with. So I went back into that same van with a different band, and I fell in love with touring. Seemless was fun, the pressure was off, I wasn’t taking myself so seriously. It was just a totally different environment. That’s when I wanted some success.”
You rejoined Killswitch in 2012. Your set at that year’s Download festival felt like an important moment. Was it?
“I knew this was an important moment for us as a band. Benji from Skindred was backstage. He came up to me and just gave me love, like, ‘Yo, this is dope. So good to see you.’ I love that dude, his energy is off the charts. Seeing him just charged me up: ‘Yes, I’m right where I belong.’
By the time we hit that stage, the sun just starting to crack through, I was so present to the moment, fighting back tears: ‘I can’t believe I’m here doing this again with these guys.’ I remember being so fulfilled. I get emotional just thinking about that moment. From that point on in my life, shit got really fucking cool.”
Touring with Iron Maiden in 2019 must have been really fucking cool…
“Oh yes! I mentioned the whole smashing of The Number Of The Beast – I actually got to tell that story to Bruce on that tour. He got such a kick out of it.”
Given your upbringing, how would you identify yourself in terms of religion these days?
“I don’t like labels. I don’t have to subscribe to what you say I should subscribe to, to feel like a spiritual being. I was raised Christian, but now I lean on Buddhism, I really like some of the philosophies from Krishna and Hinduism. Does it work? Are you treating people well? Are you living a life that’s filled with love and positivity? Good. Do it. If I were to give you a general ballpark statement, I’m a spiritual being. I absolutely do believe there’s something more to life than just us as humans.”
So you’re still searching for something?
“Always. I’m still thirsty for knowledge. I’m still hungry for the wisdom that has yet to be captured. I love knowledge, I love wisdom, I love hearing people’s stories. I love reading certain scriptures and philosophies. I add it to my brain and I continue with my wonderment and my hope. If I’m going to boil it all down to one statement: God is love. Love is the only thing that can save us as a species. Love is the only thing that is powerful enough to overcome all things.”
This Consequence is out now via Metal Blade. Killswitch are currently on tour in North America - for the full list of tour dates, visit their official website.
