The Next KILLSWITCH ENGAGE Record Will Be More Collaborative

The long-awaited new Killswitch Engage album is still being demoed, but the band is certainly making progress! In an interview with TotalRock, Killswitch Engage guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz said he and the rest of the band are currently working with vocalist Jesse Leach on lyrics for the new material.

"We're still at demo stages, but we have quite a bit of demos," said Dutkiewicz. "And Jesse's been writing and rewriting and going back to the little chopping block. We decided to have everybody in the band become a part of the lyric writing too. So Jesse will bring ideas. We say, 'We like this. We don't like this. This is the idea. Carry on with that.'"

Dutkiewicz later touched on the fact that the new Killswitch Engage record was intentionally written with everyone in the band involved. Dutkiewicz said Killswitch Engage's 2019 album Atonement was handled mostly by him, and that the rest of the band felt a little left out.

"In the past, I took a lot of it on my shoulders, to handle a lot of the duties. But I think the last record, in particular, everyone was just — they felt like a bit detached almost, because I was doing almost everything on my own. And I think they're just, like, 'We don't even feel like we made a record.' So they wanna be more of a part of the production process and the writing process. So I've made sure to keep everybody looped in and in the same circle. Communication's key to anything."

In a previous interview, Leach acknowledged that the new Killswitch Engage is taking a while, but that the band is focused on delivering something outside their usual fare.

"The album is… taking a lot longer than, I think, any of us anticipated, because there's a lot of quality control going on. And making sure that it's fresh; we're not repeating ourselves. So that process has been a little arduous but I think necessary because we don't wanna put out something that people are gonna go, 'Oh, yeah. Another Killswitch record. Whatever.'"