2002’s Alive Or Just Breathing became avowed as a definitive album, being named among “The Top 100 Greatest Metal Albums of the Decade” by Decibel and celebrated by everyone from Metal Hammer to Revolver. A musical outlier, the band pioneered a union of thrashed-out European guitar pyrotechnics, east-coast hardcore spirit, on-stage hijinks, and enlightened lyricism that set the pace for what the turn-of-the-century deemed heavy. Killswitch Engage first shook the structure of heavy music upon climbing out of snowy industrialized Western Massachusetts in 1999.
