What Twenty Years Of "The End Of Heartache" Shows Us

Genres are like fads; while they may never die out, they will never burn as hot or as bright as when they left their mark on the culture. Nothing can stay popular forever, not with society changing with each new generation that comes along. Twenty years after the fact, it can be difficult to remember what a paradigm shift felt like, because we have lived so long on the new ground.

Killswitch Engage pioneered metalcore in the mainstream, and no one ever did it bigger or better. While many will point to "Alive Or Just Breathing" as the impetus, that was not the record that conquered the world. No, that would be "The End Of Heartache", which amazingly is celebrating it's twentieth anniversary. When I stop and think about how that means I've spent half my life listening to that album, time no longer feels like a straight line.

Rather than sit here and tell you a story you don't care about, I would rather take a look back at what these twenty years have given us. It's rather interesting to have seen and heard how a band that blazed a new trail wound up digging their rut deeper and deeper.

It started with "The End Of Heartache". Killswitch Engage had a new singer, a new hunger, and they tapped into a well no one had ever drilled so deep into. Their music was heavier, the production stronger, and Howard Jones' voice more emotional. It combined to form a steamroller of an album that took the brutality of metal, the pain of emo, and a degree of songwriting few metal bands have ever possessed. The blend was perfect, the timing was right, and the result was the defining album of that time. No one could live up to that, and Killswitch Engage single-handedly dragged the entire metalcore genre into the mainstream. At least it seemed that way.

They followed that by trying to be more. "As Daylight Dies" is one of the best sounding metal records ever made, but in trying to be both heavier and more melodic, the two ends pulls the strings apart enough that we could see through the weave. Little did we know, but in one album cycle the genre had already fallen off.

The self-titled album over-corrected, going too far into melodic rock for most listeners (but not me). If this was metalcore moving forward, Killswitch Engage was marching alone. And indeed they saw the writing on the wall, as when Howard Jones left the band, they returned to their own past, dredging up the still fresh memories of Jess Leach's time in the band.

What is remarkable about this now longest period of Killswitch Engage's career is how... safe it all feels. The records come fairly regularly, they're all well-crafted, and they mostly disappear from the zeitgeist. It happens to many bands that they find a sound they are comfortable with, and they play the hits back again and again. The difference is that with the lineup change, it felt fully intentional to backtrack to their familiar sound. Again and again, the band makes records that sound like "The End Of Heartache", but never quite match the fire or passion that album captured.

Twenty years on, what has become clear is what we experience both from bands like AC/DC who essentially make the same record time and again, and also artists like Taylor Swift who literally make the same album again to get back the rights; songs are not everything - recordings matter. You can never recreate a performance exactly, and the magic you capture on tape once may never come again.

Killswitch Engage found that magic when they recorded "The End Of Heartache". The record stands up these years later as a fresh, vital, and stirring reminder of what you can achieve when you pour yourself into making music. It also serves as a warning, because it set a bar even they could not live up to. By reverting to form, and by churning out records that mine the same territory, they have in essence reminded us they'll never be as good as they once were.

That's true of everyone, but some make more of an effort to hide it. Of course, when you have one masterpiece to your credit, you probably don't need to shy away from taking your well-deserved credit.