"My dad smashed the tape of Number Of The Beast: ‘I’m forbidding Devil’s music in my house!’ That only made it more appealing.” How Jesse Leach went from "Flanders kid" to future metalcore icon

Killswitch Engage Jesse Leach.

There aren’t many vocalists in the worlds of metal and hardcore like Jesse Leach. The Killswitch Engage frontman couldn’t be further away from the stereotypical metalcore tough guy. For one thing, he’s calling Hammer via Zoom not from a big city apartment but from his new home, tucked away in the woodlands in the Catskill Mountains, upstate New York.

“I can be alone here, in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I need to be close to nature.”