Interview mit Mike D'Antonio von Killswitch Engage

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“Slow and steady wins the race” is probably what KILLSWITCH ENGAGE thought when working on their latest album “This Consequence”. Although the band usually releases new music regularly, the last record “Atonement” was released almost six years ago. In this interview, bassist Mike D’Antonio explains how the musicians unraveled their usual way of working and why “This Consequence” was so long in the making.

 

“This Consequence” is your new album. What was the creative process like? Who does what when writing songs?
Well, this one was a bit of a departure from a lot of the older records. A lot of times it’s just people in their separate rooms writing demos, bringing them to maybe a practice or just sending them via email, saying, “What do you think about this?”, and people either liking it or vetoing it, or maybe someone will add some stuff to it. But with this one, we wanted to shake it up again, all sit in a room, and come up with everything together, and I feel like it made for a more cohesive record. Everyone kind of has their own stamp on every single song. It makes it feel more like the band produced it rather than one person or three people or whatever.
So in this scenario, I think we started the practicing process in October of 2022. That’s a while ago. We met several times. The first time we met, we wrote six songs. The second time we met, another six songs. We’re like, “OK, we’re ready to record a record.” But Jesse wrote the lyrics, rewrote them, rewrote them, rewrote them again, pushing himself. We pushed him a little bit. And I think they’re all the better for it, but it took a long time to get those exactly where he felt comfortable with them. Probably a year. In a perfect world, we would have loved to have gotten this record out sooner, but sometimes these creative records take a little bit more time than usual.

So, would you say that these creative processes usually take this long with KILLSWITCH ENGAGE? Is it typical for Jesse to take his time with the lyrics, or was that because you were all in one room working together?
I think we always want Jesse to take his time. And we want to give him as much room and as little amount of stress as possible. I would say it was tinged on being a little too long, for me anyway. At this point, these songs seem old to us. We just want to get it out and play them because they’re so much fun to play. We just want to get out there and show them to the world. And excitingly enough, it’s going to happen in a week. So we’re just really excited that it’s finally going to get out there. Because like I said, it’s been done for a while, or at least my section of this part has been done for quite a while.

How do you think this has affected the album? And how do you think it’s affected you guys as a band? Did this new approach of working together have any effect?
I think it’s had the effect of we’ll probably do this for every record going forward. I don’t know how many more we have in us. We’ll see. We’re all getting pretty old at this point. I don’t think we’ll do it forever, even though we love doing it and it’s the best job you could ever do. Each record is like, “Oh, wow. That was fun. Do we want to do another? Oh, sure. We’ll do another. OK, cool.” I guess this job is going to continue. We just never know what’s going to happen.
I’m sure a lot of bands probably don’t know what’s going to happen. But yeah, I can see us sticking to this sort of template of everyone contributing and having a say. It feels super cohesive and everyone feels like they had a stake in this thing, which is about the best thing you can do for a five-member band.
It has to be fun, or we wouldn’t be doing it. Obviously, we’re the metal band that smiles and has jokes and does things that most metal bands look down upon and “poo-poo” as being not metal. But we’re just all friends having a good time. And there are lots of inside jokes, lots of really funny things that happen. And we’re not going to not show that. We’re going to have fun with the audience, too, and bring them in on the joke and have everyone laugh together, hopefully, rather than sneer. And we’re not going to spit on you, we’re not going to scream at you. We’re just going to have fun with you. Let’s go, Let’s do it!
Yeah. That’s my experience with seeing you guys live as well.
Well, that’s cool. I mean, we want to be inviting. We want to have everyone included. Some of these guys just take themselves too seriously. We don’t. I guess that’s the bottom line. We don’t take ourselves seriously at all.

You’ve been a band for over 25 years, and the music industry has obviously gone through some intense changes, such as social media, streaming, and listening habits. People tend to listen to shorter songs instead of longer ones. How has this affected the way you make music?
I guess shorter records now. Ten songs on the new record. We kind of have this philosophy of Slayer, “Reign in Blood” as being like one of those records that you can put on and be stoked, and then it’s over. Just really kind of a quick burst of energy. And we want that, we wanted to do that. We knew people didn’t have the attention span. It’s funny that you write 12, or 14 songs for a record and maybe two get noticed because those are the video tunes. And it feels bad to us who are creatively writing these songs that we’re really excited about and having no one really pay attention to them. So we thought the shorter record would make more sense in that sort of idea.
But, being the art guy, it’s actually a cool revelation that now we’re going back to vinyl, which is really big artwork. I did all the artwork for the cover, the singles, all that stuff. I love working on really big artwork. I love doing different intricate packaging. It’s really fun to show off a new idea for a package or something like that to entice people to actually go out to the store and buy something these days because it doesn’t happen very often anymore. It’s so much easier to throw something on Spotify.
So creatively for me, it’s a super fun time to be able to go out on a limb, maybe spend a little more money on a product that looks cooler that people will want to maybe even just put on their shelf or if they like the record, maybe they’ll frame it or something like that. I think for me, that’s one of the cooler aspects nowadays. It’s fun to look at it while you’re listening to the record, to flip through the sheet, the pages, and maybe if it’s gatefold, open the gatefold up and kind of imagine whoever that is playing, in your living room.

So, what’s the inspiration for the Artwork for “This Consequence”?
“This Consequence” is kind of like the consequence of our actions, the world. The pitch to the band I have written down here. When I was coming up with the concept for the cover, I said, “A broken world of ancient stone machines grinds to a halt in a shroud of rust and decay. Futuristic robots from the past excavated in present day.” It’s kind of like a mirror of us from the past, how we were more intelligent than we are now.

“This Consequence” seems to feature a few really blatantly political songs like “Abandon Us”, “Discordant Nation” and “Collusion”. I know that you’ve never really shied away from, being political or speaking your mind about things that you think are important. Why do you think it’s important right now to raise your voice and to raise your voice about these issues?
Yeah. America’s in a weird place doing some weird stuff in countries we have no business doing it in. Everyone’s really nervous everywhere in the world scared of World War Three. It’s very close. It could happen any day. It’s a scary thing. So if we could say something on our record to discourage that, or to maybe throw a positive spin at the end of bringing it up, all the better. The record from beginning to end was sequenced by Jesse in an order that made sense to him in an order that told a story going from really negative to more positive as it goes along in the story. That could be attributed to the world today and I think having a positive outlook can help more than hurt. And I think if everyone had more of a positive way of looking at things, the world could be a much better place. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s much harder to be positive, than being negative. But it’s necessary.

Is that something that you stick to? Do you try to stay positive about things, try to see the silver lining?
Not me (laughs). Jesse. I have a wife who is extremely positive and she sways me towards the positive end of the spectrum whenever I’m getting too negative for my own good. I’m a very sarcastic person and sometimes that could be misconstrued as nasty, but I’m not. And I don’t mean it that way, but I’m learning to be a better person and it is due to my wife.

That’s really beautiful! I’ve noticed that throughout the album, there are a few nods towards faith and towards God. Is that something that’s important to Jesse? Is that something that’s important to you guys in the band or do you not necessarily share that?
Jesse grew up as a preacher’s son, so he grew up in faith and then disavowed it. And then I guess kind of went back to it. For some reason, I thought he wasn’t into it anymore, but the new record shows that he is. I grew up in faith and kind of fell off the train. I don’t particularly have a faith other than believing in some master creator, some ethereal being had to create this. I mean, I don’t know how else it would have happened, but I’m not necessarily a religious guy, so to speak. That might be more of a Jesse question. I found it strange, but hey man, if it’s going to be the positive swing that people need to help them out of a funk, I’m all for it.
That makes perfect sense. I’m pointing it out because it did come as a surprise to me. When I read the lyrics and when I listened to the album, it was kind of surprising to hear.
Did you think it was more of a Christian outlook or just like a positive ethereal creator outlook?
I think it was more of just a spiritual outlook.
That’s what I’m hoping that people get from that.
Because Christianity is one of the biggest religions on this planet, I feel like people will tend to interpret that, but me personally, that’s not what I got from it.
Good. So you interpreted it the way you want it to and I interpret it the way I want to. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Music is very speculative, so you never know from person to person, what they’re going to take from each song. Me personally, I don’t even really know a lot of lyrics to my favourite bands. I make up words that I think are stronger and I sing those lyrics. So I don’t even pay attention to that stuff.

What’s something that you’ve learned in 25 years of KILLSWITCH ENGAGE? Something you can tell newcomers maybe?
Let’s see, something that I’ve learned. Always bring flip-flops on tour with you. Otherwise, you will get funky things happening on your feet when you go in the shower. Never talk about tours that have not been announced. What else do I get in trouble for? That, just because you’re in a metal band, you can still have fun. It’s great. It’s a great thing for not only you, but the crowd to include them in the joke while you’re playing, and to bring everybody in on the fun that we’re having on stage. And I think that’s a main goal of ours. It’s something we really try to do.

Looking back on your career with KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, what were some of your personal highlights and lowlights of the band?
Playing Wacken for the first time was a huge highlight. 80,000 people. We played right in between the reunion of At The Gates and the reunion of Carcass. Two of my favourite metal bands ever, and we’re playing in between them on a festival, that is notably one of the more “metal” festivals ever. I thought we were going to get pelted with tomatoes. I was really nervous. We’re metal, but maybe not as metal as some of these other bands that were playing that day. And the Wacken dudes don’t take any shit, they want to see metal bands playing metal. So I couldn’t look up from my bass for the first four songs, ‘cause I wasn’t sure how the crowd was reacting. But as you can see from our “This Is Absolution” video, which was filmed that same day, it went over extremely well. We had one of the biggest walls of death I’ve ever seen in my life. We were able to capture it on video and stressful, nerve-wracking, and scary turned into one of the best shows of my life.
I can’t remember what year it was, but we also played Full Force Fest and there were openings in the middle of the stage where you could just look down through the stage to the grass below, which is probably 14 feet. And during our set, it had rained and it was starting to get sunny again. There were kind of puddles everywhere, and they had drones flying around filming us and to avoid a drone, I moved and fell into one of the holes in the stage and fell 14 feet down on my neck.
My bass’ head went straight into the ground, snapped, and broke. This was on the second song of the set and everyone thought I was dead because it was such a huge fall. Luckily, it was grass. I thought I was dead at first but I looked around and said “Wow, I feel fine.” I walked back up the stairs to get back up on the stage and as I’m walking back on stage, dudes from Mastodon are like, “Oh my God, are you okay? We thought you died.” All these bands were coming up to me. But I jumped right back in and started playing the rest of the set. I had grass sticking out of the headstock of my bass and it was already broken, so I was able to take it and break it on stage. It was such a rock-star move. So that was the worst experience and the best experience ever. I was able to smash a guitar on stage. Like Kiss would normally do, or some big rock star. It was fun and scary because it didn’t break on the first two smashes. I guess the goal, for anybody who wants to know, is to hit it on the corner of the stage. ‘Cause it’s more like hitting it like an axe into the corner and it’s more of a point to it. So if you ever want to break your guitar on stage, that’s the way to do it. But boy, oh boy, my sponsors at Ibanez were bummed, but they saw my point at the end. I never broke another one. That was the only one I ever broke.

At Metal1.info, we have this little tradition where at the end of the interview, we do this brainstorming/ hot seat situation. So I’m going to say something and you just say the first thing that comes to mind.
Favourite song: At the moment, “Cowboys From Hell” If I’m feeling really negative, I can throw on “Cowboys From Hell” and that opening riff will stoke me out so much that I immediately have a smile on my face.
2025: 2025 has a busy outlook for me. I would say busy and exciting are the words.
Favourite non-metal artist or band: The Cure is my favourite band ever. And I love almost every single record.
USA: Could do better. There’s potential to do better and fingers are crossed. Need to do better.
KILLSWITCH ENGAGE in ten years:  Dead. I really don’t know how much longer we’re going to do it. I’m going to be 52 this year. I don’t know that age matters as long as you have cool riffs, look at Judas Priest, they’re still killing it. But you never know if we’re just going to get bored of the whole thing and just call it a day. In ten years, I hope that we’re still putting out records. So hope that we’re not dead.