In a new interview with the JJO Discover New Music Podcast, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE singer Jesse Leach spoke about the band’s latest album, “This Consequence”, which came out on February 21 via Metal Blade. “This Consequence” is KILLSWITCH ENGAGE’s ninth LP overall, and sixth with Leach, who rejoined the band in 2012. Asked why now was the right time for KILLSWITCH ENGAGE to release a new record, Jesse said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I think the timing is perfect. It just feels like the world is in a state now where I feel like extreme music, metal music, has a real place in it. There’s a lot of people who are frustrated and anxious and this type of music is therapeutic. So, to me, it’s great. The gap, too, was admittedly working hard on the record, but also the pandemic took it out of us. During that time, it wasn’t a very creative time for any of us. So, it just happened to work out in such a way where it’s dropping, to me, at a perfect time.”Reflecting on the way the pandemic negatively affected his creativity, Jesse said: “We had just finished putting out our other record, [2019’s] ‘Atonement’, and being shut down three days into the tour… So when you put that much effort into a creative project and then nothing happens — I had no creativity ’cause I’d put everything into that record, and my mindset was, like, ‘Now we’re gonna go on tour.’ So when the pandemic hit, at first it was, like, ‘Oh, we get a nice break. This is crazy. We haven’t had a break in a long time.’ And then it turned into, like, ‘Wow, are we ever gonna do this again?’ But I think for me it was a very meditative, sort of self-reflective time where creativity, especially with music, just kind of took a side seat to me, sort of like going deep within myself and, like, ‘Who am I without this band?’ It was definitely a huge question in my mind. But coming out of it and a lot of the thoughts that I had that stayed with me, this album helped me process that. It helped me filter out a lot of my frustrations and my anger, and I think that’s what metal music and hardcore music should be. It’s therapy.”Regarding the challenges he encountered finding inspiration for the new KILLSWITCH ENGAGE songs, Jesse said: “Yeah, I felt like I shed layers of my soul, for sure. Going into it, I feel like I didn’t really have the voice that I eventually discovered. It was kind of a false start. We ended up throwing away, like, six or seven of my demos. ‘Cause I think I just had to tap into that frustration that I keep bringing up because I think I suppressed it a lot. And I’m sure a lot of us went through weird frames of mind during the pandemic. I think for me it was getting back in touch with the reason why I even started doing this in the first place, is ’cause I wanted to have a voice for the voiceless. I wanted to speak about the problems of the world. I wanted to put it all out there. And I think when I started this album, it just felt like I didn’t know what to say. I was still kind of numb about it. But through that process, I was able to tap back into that spirit, that revolutionary wanting to shake up the status quo and have people think for themselves and deliver a message that hopefully will help people.”KILLSWITCH ENGAGE kicked off its first tour of North America since late 2022 on March 5 at The Pinnacle in Nashville, Tennessee. The trek, featuring support from KUBLAI KHAN TX, FIT FOR A KING and FROZEN SOUL, will run through April 12 in Portland, Maine.In a separate interview with United Rock Nations, Jesse was asked what the biggest challenge was in making “This Consequence”. He said: “I think for me wanting to be, and I use this word loosely, relevant, but relevant to me and my bandmembers. I wanted what I had to say to excite them, but I also needed it to be genuine. I needed it to be something that when I looked at those lyrics, I thought, ‘Yes. That’s exactly what I wanna say.'”I went through — I don’t know — seven, eight songs where I was kind of just throwing it out to see what would stick,” he continued. “And those guys were, like, ‘This doesn’t feel like you’re really giving us your best.’ So having that sort of rejection from them initially was very hard. It sort of felt like I was becoming insecure. I was wondering if I had it in me. But that turned into a determination to rediscover myself as a writer, to go deeper, to tap into things that I never tapped in before, and to sort of look outside of myself. I mean, after everything we’ve been through, there’s so much to draw from. There’s so much to pull from. So I started pulling from things that I was seeing on mainstream media. I started pulling from stories that I heard from people that they’ve been through. I started pulling from extreme relationships of abuse and just kind of dialing them all into a story — obviously coming from me and the way that I saw and felt about those things, but it ended up becoming much more of a worldview as opposed to just me going, ‘I, me, I.’ It was more about us — ‘This is about us.’ Hence the title ‘This Consequence’. It’s about us — all of us. How do you respond to these situations? How do you modify your behavior? What lessons have you learned? And realizing that with everything that you do, there’s going to be a reaction.”So, the big picture to me is what I was focusing on and how to how to heal our PTSD from everything we’ve gone through and realizing that we’re still all going through it,” Leach added. “We may not realize it, but we are. And how do we allow the outside sources that are constantly manipulating us to control our minds and to continue to keep us divided? The challenge was how do I crack that code? How do I get that message through to people? And I did the best I could. And I think I did pretty damn well.”Asked if writing about all those topics was a form of therapy for him, Leach said: “Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, it is. And I think it’s necessary. You can’t avoid it. And I think I avoided it a lot during the pandemic. I wanted nothing to do with it, ’cause it was such a volatile time. I think we’re all sort of coming down off that, and it’s not so intense where people are actually open to discussions of, or maybe you weren’t 100 percent accurate or correct in your belief. Maybe you have room to be wrong here, and if so, what did you learn from that? And how do you move forward without having that assumption being part of your vocabulary? I think all of that is very important. And as a writer, how do I write it in such a way where you as a listener can draw your own conclusion? So I’m not giving you the answer. I’m asking you to think about this thing. And then what do you think about that? You as the listener can sort of put the answer on that question. And that’s really what I tried to do — writing with a broad enough brushstroke where the song can be yours. I penned the lyrics, but I very much want you to sort of take the torch and run with it.”Leach talked about the “dark”, “angry” and “aggressive” nature of “This Consequence” with Joshua Toomey of the “Talk Toomey” podcast. He said: “Yeah, I think angry, dark and aggressive, for better or for worse, is kind of what the world needs right now, I think, therapeutically speaking. I think a lot of us can relate to frustration, anger, betrayal, all those things, and that’s kind of what I highlighted lyrically with this album; I was really focusing on that stuff. But I will say this: if you really read into the lyrics, there’s a positivity through a righteous anger, anger that wants to sort of wake people up and have people choose their own path instead of just the blind leading the blind, which is what we see so much in society and our governments and organized religion and all these things that control us as people. It’s very much about breaking out of the matrix, if you will, and carving your own path. And there’s a righteous anger underneath all of it, and that’s where the positivity lies. But I think with metal music, the great thing about it is you can talk about dark stuff and it is therapeutic. That’s why a lot of us get into this kind of music.”Elsewhere in the chat, Leach touched upon his growth as a vocalist since the release of 2019’s “Atonement” LP, saying: “Truth be told, [‘This Consequence’] was very difficult for me to write and sort of find my inspiration again. And even vocally, learning new techniques, like the vocal fry, and trying to add that into my old technique and still sound like me, it was a long, hard process.”Especially after my vocal surgery in 2018, I relearned how to speak differently — I speak differently than I did,” he explained. “I’m more measured; I make sure my voice is placed in the right place. And through that, it went into my vocals, my singing, especially. I was really focusing on my singing first and foremost to stay in key and not go flat or sharp. Then it was, like, my screams were — I was so paranoid. I was really worried about… We do three shows in a row. That fourth show, I’m, like, ‘It’s getting difficult. I can feel the swelling happening.’ So I was really studying vocal fry, ’cause you can do a lot of cool stuff with fry, but me with my voice, it has such a signature sound to it, I guess, according to Adam [Dutkiewicz, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE guitarist and producer], at least, that if I just went into that new technique completely, the lows were missing something, my yelling. It different. So I was going into these demos just doing fry, saving my voice, especially thinking that, once I get to the studio, it’s going to be fatiguing; we’re doing four- or five-hour sessions. But I kept falling flat and the voice just didn’t sound right. For some of the high stuff, it works, but for the lower, mid stuff and for the death metal growls, that’s all old school… It’s the old-school way, the way we all started doing it in the late ’80s and early ’90s. So I’ve learned, thankfully, through a lot of trial and error, and this album had a lot to do with it, to blend the styles. So I can do my old-school stuff, and then I can sort of blend in some of the vocal fry to hit those crazy, maniacal-sounding highs without it destroying my voice.”[embedded content]