Killswitch Engage Celebrates Album’s 10th Anniversary with Tour

by Kevin Johnson Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Killswitch Engage

Killswitch Engage is celebrating the 10th anniversary of their breakthrough album Alive or Just Breathing with a U.S. tour during which they’ll play the album in its entirety.

The 20-date tour will feature support from Shadows Fall and Acaro. Anchored by bassist Mike D’Antonio, the group recently reenlisted their original singer Jesse Leach, who sang on the 2002 effort but left the group shortly after its release.

“I honestly never thought I would have the opportunity to sing these songs on stage with Killswitch again,” Leach said in a press release. “Now here I am back in the band and celebrating 10 years of the release of this record. I am absolutely thrilled for this tour. I can’t wait to sing ‘Rise inside’ and ‘Just Barely Breathing’ among others. On top of it all, we have our good friends in Shadows Fall and Acaro joining us. This tour will be one we will all remember!”

The band is also working on a new album, which D’Antonio says will be fresh and aggressive.

“We took two years off so we were going to get aggressive no matter what with writing the new record,” he told The Aquarian. “I started a new band in the interim just to have something to do called Death Ray Vision, which was a throwback band to my old band Overcast (Brian Fair of Shadows Fall sings in the band). It just really kind of pumped me up for the new Killswitch record and writing more of my roots than back to basics, heavier, more aggressive stuff—tons of blast beats and all that. But Jesse came in at the end of that whole thing, so we had already written this pretty blazing album before Jesse was even back in the band. Certainly adding his lyrics on top—which have notably been my favorite lyrics of all time, of anybody—it’s just like the icing on the cake and the cherry on top. We really couldn’t be happier.”