“I feel like the past few years have been the most consistent and happy that everyone’s been,” says Stroetzel. “It’s been a rollercoaster ride. It was obviously a big scare when Howard [Jones] left the band, because we were like, ‘What are we going to do? How is that going to work?’”
Much to the band’s relief, Leach returned with a new gusto. “He had all the reasons not to want to do it back in the day, which is totally fair, but we were just really lucky it all came together. I feel like internally, it’s the happiest everybody has been for quite some time.”
Killswitch Engage began work on Incarnate,sharing song ideas and demos via email from their various home dwellings. Stroetzel says that his preferred method of song writing involves burning the midnight oil alongside a drum machine. “For me personally, I do my writing at night. I have an old two-track drum machine and I lay down a drum track and some scratch guitars, trying to piece together songs. I think it’s kind of the same thing for most of the other guys. Once we get stuff that we think is worthy of sharing with each other, we email it and from that point we decide whether we need to get together and jam.”
When the band was satisfied by its collective efforts, they convened and began developing what would soon be Incarnate. “We did that a little more with this record than we have in the past. A lot of the other records were a combination of us being able to play live in a room together and writing from our homes. We just didn’t have that luxury on this album, with all of us living so far away.”
Despite the lack of proximity, Stroetzel is confident the writing process had little affect on the album’s outcome, “Adam and Justin worked out midi drum tracks for the demos we had, and we each started learning the songs that way. As the songs came together, we would hand them off to Jesse so he could start writing and putting his ideas together, so it really wasn’t that different from jamming live in a room, instead it was just a bunch of guys sitting in front of a computer in a room [laughs].”
With the demise of Soundwave Festival and consequentially Killswitch Engage’s 2016 trip to Australia, the conversation diverts to the likelihood of a return to the sunburnt country. “That was quite a bummer when we found out we weren’t able to come over, we always look forward to Soundwave and just going to Australia in general. It’s such a great place and such a great scene, other than the long flight over there [laughs]. Hopefully something will come around as far as a good festival. I guess we are going to have to come back and do some kind of club tour in the very near future.”
BY AARON STREATFEILD
