adam dutkiewicz

Killswitch Engage: The Jackass & the Nerd

Photos by Annie Atlasman

Adam D and Joel Stroetzel of Killswitch Engage on Atonement and keeping it fun as BFFs for 25+ years.

When a band’s been around for a couple of decades, they’ve usually become a well-oiled machine, a harmony of personalities, a family that didn’t just choose each other but has developed a balance and process that both produces consistently and endures. Metalcore band Killswitch Engage is one group that possesses that special alchemy.

This summer, they released their eighth full-length studio album, Atonement. The album delivers 11 new tracks of the Killswitch sound: blistering metal arrangements with vocal and guitar harmonies, surprisingly melodic choruses balanced by screaming lead vocals, and triumphant, often visceral lyrics. It’s an approach that’s worked particularly well for the band since their third LP, 2004’s Grammy-nominated The End of Heartache. “Can’t change who we are,” laughs Adam Dutkiewicz, one half of the band’s guitar attack.

He and co-guitarist Joel Stroetzel don’t confine themselves to lead or rhythm roles. Their goal is to synchronize. That’s also reflective of the band’s overall creative attitude. No one acts exactly like the leader, or father of the “family.” It’s very clear they’re all brothers, if not quintuplets, with different personalities that happen to complement each other.

The recording of Atonement was a bit different from earlier Killswitch Engage albums due to the amount of interruptions. It took three-and-a-half years—in part due to vocalist Jesse Leach needing surgery after developing polyps on his vocal cords, and the band being invited to tour with Iron Maiden last summer. The album also came after the band switched labels from Roadrunner to Metal Blade. Dutkiewicz has been the group’s producer since day one, and was a bit burnt out by the end—but not because of any tendencies toward perfectionism in the studio. “A record should be a snapshot in time,” he says. “You can listen to it two years later and say you should have done things different, but then it wouldn’t be who you were at that period of time.”

The 6-string duo have plenty to say about everything from their commitment to the band to their passion for gear, which balances the old and the new—looking toward the future even as they celebrate their history.

It’s been 20 years since KSE’s eponymous debut. Was there anything different about your approach to Atonement?
Adam Dutkiewicz: I wanted to write songs that were a little bit more on the aggressive side, just ’cause I feel like this band can so easily fall into the trap of doing [too many] mid-tempo songs. Beyond that, it was pretty much the same thing.

Joel Stroetzel:Disarm the Descent [from 2013] was a bit thrashier than [2016’s] Incarnate. We wanted to get back to doing some stuff more like that—get more guitar work going on.

Is it true that each bandmember contributed three to five demos this time, as well?
Stroetzel: Yeah, pretty much everybody writes riffs and then once we get enough ideas together we figure out arrangements. We’ll throw it out to Jesse and see which songs he gravitates to. He’ll go out in the woods and sit around and write bits and pieces of some ideas—verses, choruses, whatever he has in his mind. Then usually it’s him and Adam that sit down with the music and try to piece it all together.

Dutkiewicz: It’s weird, because now we live so far away from each other. I moved to the West Coast, Justin [Foley, drummer] lives in Florida, Joel’s in Western Massachusetts, Mike [D’Antonio, bassist] is near Boston, and Jesse’s in New York, so we can’t really get together and jam. We try to write music on our own and show each other our ideas through email. If we like ’em, they make the [cut], but if we don’t like ’em they just get thrown in the trash. Or, we actually do get together and see if we can make them better.

How do you decide which ones to keep?
Dutkiewicz: Just conversations together. It’s kind of a lengthy process, because obviously it has to make it past our own individual drawing boards first. I’ll work on a song for a good four hours, then shelve it for a day or two, then listen to it again. A lot of the time I end up throwing it out. Or if the ideas there just need a little tweaking, I’ll work on it a bit more, and then I’ll finally email it out. If everyone says they like it, we’ll just use it the way it is, but if some people say, “yeah, we like the chorus part but the rest of the song sucks,” we’ll try to get some new parts.

“I couldn’t do it without Joel. We’ve literally been best friends for close to 25 years.” —Adam Dutkiewicz

What was the recording process like for this record?
Stroetzel: Justin flew out to San Diego to do drums there with Adam. Then we had a little portable rig and Mike knocked out a lot of his bass tracks on headphones in hotel rooms on days off. As far as guitar and vocals, we did a lot of that in Adam’s studio in San Diego. We did some of the guitars at my place [in Massachusetts], and vocals were kind of a mixture: San Diego and Zing Studios [in Westfield, Massachusetts], where we’ve done a lot of the records in the past. It took a while to piece it all together.

There were a fair number of complications along the way.…
Dutkiewicz: It was a pain in my ass, absolutely! It felt like it would never end, to be honest with you. The longer you work on a project, the more you have the capability of losing your focus and clarity on it. I felt like this one went on a little too long, but we can only do so much when things come up, like Jesse having to get surgery, and we’re not going to say “no” to touring with Iron Maiden for three months! We have to roll with the punches.

Adam, you’ve been producing the band’s albums since the beginning. What’s that like for you both?
Dutkiewicz: My most important role is resident jackass [laughs]. I try to be the guy in the band that makes the shows as fun as possible, and makes sure we’re not that band that’s perceived as taking themselves very seriously. But yeah, I definitely have another role of being that guy who likes to spearhead the record production, get everything organized and structured, and pull it all together. Since I was the guy that started the band with Mike, that’s just been my role from the beginning. I love being so active in the creative process of what it is to be in Killswitch Engage. It’s fun.

Stroetzel: Adam’s really good at doing the double-duty thing, as far as writing, playing on the record, producing everybody, and producing himself. He pushes everybody pretty hard to do their best and get stuff right. I’ve been around when he tracks his own guitars, and he holds himself to that same standard. He’s not just bullying the rest of us. He really has the greater good at heart. It’s good having him steer the ship.

TIDBIT: Recording Atonement took more than three years due to factors such as vocal-cord surgery for singer Jesse Leach, and an interim tour with Iron Maiden.

Dutkiewicz: I don’t think of it like I’m the leader of the band. We’re all in it together, you know? I just feel like I’m probably the most driven in helping get the songs finished. It’s in my blood, versus how a lot of the other guys have trouble finishing ideas and sentences.

Stroetzel: Which I’m very jealous of. Me and Mike will come up with a lot of parts, and we tend to need each other’s help to piece it together and make cohesive songs. I’ll sit around and try to program drums for a song, and I’m not very good at that. Definitely helps to have a couple guys with drummers’ brains actually put in the right fills to make parts fit together.

It must also be nice not having to worry about being assigned a producer you might not like.
Dutkiewicz: Exactly. It’s always felt organic and homegrown with us.

Stroetzel: We’ve always been a pretty self-contained unit. Even the artwork—Mike’s done all the artwork for the band since the beginning. We don’t really have too many outside opinions coming in as far as the vision for the band.

What’s your favorite song on the album?
Dutkiewicz: I always say the one with [Testament vocalist] Chuck Billy, “The Crownless King,” just because I love his voice on that song so much. He’s been one of the greatest metal singers out there for so many years, so it’s just an honor to have him on the record. His voice is killer.

Stroetzel: Testament’s been one of my favorite bands since I was a kid, and I always loved Chuck’s voice, so it was really cool that he was able to sing on that. “The Signal Fire” is a fun one to play. Those are some of the ones we just introduced to set.

How do you feel about the album after letting it sit for a while?
Dutkiewicz: I haven’t listened to it since we made it—two years straight was enough. I’m excited that there’s a lot of people that are hearing it for the first time who like it. That’s the ultimate goal—trying to make our fans happy—and there are some songs on there that I’m proud of. I kind of don’t hate the first half of the record [laughs]. I think Jesse did a really good job, too. Lyrics can really make or break a song for me.

Rig Rundown: Killswitch Engage

Video

One of metalcore’s biggest bands allows PG to check out their signature instruments and the minimal gear they use to punish crowds on a nightly basis.

Joel Stroetzel, Adam Dutkiewicz, and Mike D’Antonio of Killswitch Engage met with PG's Perry Bean before their 2016 tour stop in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Orange Peel—where the trio gladly breezed through their barebones-but-brutal setups.

rig-rundown bassists ibanez gear videos artists featured-stories laney whats-new special-featured-stories adam-dutkiewicz mike-dantonio ebs maxon killswitch-engage guitarists caparison-guitars joel-stroetzel

Killswitch Engage: Ironhearts, Redemption, and Big Digits

Adam Dutkiewicz, Joel Stroetzel (Photos by LDOphoto.net), and Mike D'Antonio

Rejuvenated by the return of original singer Jesse Leach, Killswitch Engage’s Adam Dutkiewicz, Joel Stroetzel, and Mike D’Antonio deliver pummeling riffs and walls of wailing guitar solos on "Disarm the Descent."

As ominous as the name “Killswitch Engage” may sound, as gutturally as the metalcore vets’ verses might assault the ears of the faint, as chest-thumpingly ferocious as their blastbeats and breakdowns are, and as infamously irreverent and, well, goofy as their most visible member, guitarist/producer Adam Dutkiewicz, may be onstage, the Boston-based quintet has always been about warm-’n’-fuzzy messages of hope, redemption, and forgiveness.

Yeah, it can be a little weird taking such ponderous themes seriously when you’re either shaking your head or laughing your ass off at a 6' 4" dude with huge Amish chops and a fauxhawk storming the stage with a tuxedo-print muscle shirt, Daisy Duke cutoffs with boxers hanging out the bottom, a cape and/or inflatable sex toy strung about his neck, and perhaps an outline of his, er, “member” Sharpie’d onto his thigh. But beyond the catchy paeans to optimism wedged between the brutal verses of Killswitch tunes like “Unbroken,” “Breathe Life,” and “A Light in a Darkened World,” there does seem to be something to the conciliatory, life-affirming lyrics.

The biggest test of all that talk goes way back to 2002, and it came full circle last year. After seeing their sophomore album, Alive or Just Breathing, reach No. 37 on Billboard’s Top Heatseekers chart, Dutkiewicz, fellow guitarist Joel Stroetzel, and bassist Mike D’Antonio had the breath knocked clean out of them when original vocalist Jesse Leach—who’d been suffering from vocal-cord issues and depression—gave notice he was leaving. Via email … just days before a gig.

No one could blame the four remaining members of KSE if they’d left Leach on their blacklist when they found themselves singer-less again after the 2012 departure of Howard Jones—the guy whose uncommonly versatile and melodic vocals paved the way for tunes like “The End of Heartache,” “My Curse,” and “The Arms of Sorrow” to find favor with movie studios, video-game producers, and the Grammy-nominating committee.

And yet, here they are, fresh off the release of their sixth full-length album, Disarm the Descent—which sees the return of Leach and more fleet-fingered guitar solos than Dutkiewicz and Stroetzel have ever put to disk strewn amidst the relentlessly throttling riffs.

You guys seem revitalized on this album. How did having Jesse back in the fold change your outlook—other than apparently paving the way for more guitar solos?
Mike D’Antonio: [Laughs.] There were actually more solos, but we took them out. Joel didn’t want it to seem like all of a sudden there were too many running rampant all over the record. But, if you can play ’em, why not have ’em, right? That’s what I said, anyway.

As far as the music goes, everything was complete before Jesse joined. We’d had two years off, trying to figure out what was going on with Howard, and I was just stewing—I really wanted to get out and play. So I was writing really pissed-off music—old-school stuff with breakdowns and flip-flopping beats like I used to write when I was a kid listening to New York hardcore like the Cro-Mags, Leeway, Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, and Madball.

When I went to the demo session for the new album, I played the first song, which was “All That We Have,” and it was so in-your-face that Adam turned to me and said, “This is exactly what I want to do.” I was, like, “Score one for the little guy!” [Laughs.]

Adam Dutkiewicz: I was a little unhappy with the last record and how it felt a little ballad-y, a little singer-songwriter-y at times. I wanted to make more of a return to metal and put some more aggression into the music. I think we all tried to write faster, spunkier songs.

Joel Stroetzel: It’s fun to have Jesse back. Everybody’s happy and having a good time. We’re more fired up.

Mike, you mentioned the demo session. What’s that process like?
D’Antonio: We go our separate ways and write demos, and then bring them to practice and sit in a circle and listen to what’s there and decide what we’d like to pursue. Next, we set up Pro Tools and some automated drums, have everyone play the guitar parts they’re liking, and add and subtract riffs. It’s a really streamlined way to develop songs, but it’s totally different—I’m used to jamming out with buddies in a room.

What were the vocalist auditions like?
D’Antonio: We did it in New York—we wanted to make sure we left no stone unturned. We spent all day ushering people in and out, playing the same three songs over and over. Six o’clock rolls around, and we’re all dead tired—we’d just eaten a lot of pizza and drunk a lot of alcohol—and Jesse walks into the room. The mood immediately brightened, and we proceeded to play 14 songs. No one saw that coming. There were smiles, happiness, a sense of synergy—we just had a really good time. We didn’t think, “Oh, we’re tired,” we just thought, “Wow, this is really cool and these songs sound great.” Three-quarters of them were Howard tunes, and I think Jesse did that to show us not only that he really wanted the job, but also that he was going to take it seriously. He definitely sounds different—he’s not a carbon copy. We could’ve easily found a carbon copy of Jones, but we wanted somebody real, and we wanted somebody who believed in what they were doing.

Stroetzel: I think one of the things we liked the most about Jesse coming back is almost the same thing we liked about Howard: Howard was the one guy, years ago, that wasn’t trying to sound like Jesse. He came and did his own thing. It’s the same thing now. A lot of the people we tried were really good but they tried to mimic Howard a bit, whereas Jesse just came in and did his own thing. We were, like, “Y’know, that’s cool—it doesn’t sound fake at all.”

Did the fact that Jesse has a different vocal style and a narrower range than Howard affect how you wrote the new songs?
Stroetzel: Not really. Howard was still with us when we were writing a lot of this record. I don’t think we changed the writing process at all, instrumentally.

Dutkiewicz: We look at it really simple when we’re putting a song together: Just try to make it feel good, try to do what feels right … y’know, it’s all vibe, man.

But that was something we were concerned about when we hired Jesse—we wanted to make sure he was going to do justice to the Howard songs, which are pretty much 10 years of our career. During the tryouts, he sold us on it. He did Howard’s songs great. He put passion in it, and he put his own little spin on all the songs.

D’Antonio: Jesse’s scope is a bit narrower than Howard’s. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because I think his emotions are more apparent—he really feels what he’s saying, and you can tell that pretty easily. One of the main concerns, obviously, would be playing the Howard tunes live. They’re a really important part of the development of the band, and the Howard records are our biggest-selling by far.

Jerry Cantrell Rig Rundown [2024]