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JESSE LEACH PICKS THE 5 HEAVY BANDS THAT SHAPED HIM

Photo: Dimitry Mak When we asked Jesse Leach to put together a top five for Metal Edge, the Killswitch Engage and Times of Grace frontman went digging into the heavy, hard-to-classify corners of his record collection. His picks lean toward bands that resist tidy genre tags — records that rewired how he hears aggression, atmosphere, and everything in the murk between. "I don't really know if they fit into a category," Leach says, "but they're bands that shaped me." Here are his five, in his order. 1. Neurosis Leach doesn't hold back on the band that tops his list. "Neurosis to me are more like a religious movement or a cult," he says, and the reverence tracks. The Oakland band started out in the late '80s as a scrappy hardcore-punk outfit, then spent the next two decades slowly mutating into something vast and ritualistic, laying down much of the blueprint that other bands would later file under post-metal. Leach walks the arc himself, from the punk snarl of The Word as Law through the experimental turn of Souls at Zero and on to the crushing peak of 1996's Through Silver in Blood, still the record most fans point to when they try to explain why the band feels less like a concert and more like a spiritual event. He carries the thread all the way to 2012's Honor Found in Decay, and if the whole catalog is new to you, this is the year to start: Neurosis resurfaced in 2026 with An Undying Love for a Burning World, a comeback strong enough to earn them a spot on our 20 Best Albums of 2026 So Far. 2. ISIS If Neurosis built the temple, ISIS furnished it with wide, cavernous rooms. Aaron Turner's Boston-bred crew turned heaviness into architecture, stacking patient, atmospheric post-metal into songs that swell and recede like tides — Leach singles out the way even the drums breathe differently, the snare loosened until it lands with a deep, hollow thud. He points newcomers toward the pairing most fans start with, 2002's Oceanic and 2004's Panopticon, then nudges them on toward 2006's In the Absence of Truth. There's a neat bit of symmetry in Leach's top two, as well: Turner joined the reactivated Neurosis in 2024, closing the loop between the two bands that shaped so much of this sound. 3. Kiss It Goodbye From here the list drops the atmosphere and goes for the throat. Kiss It Goodbye were a short-lived Seattle unit built from the wreckage of New Jersey noise-hardcore legends Deadguy and Rorschach, fronted by Tim Singer's throat-shredding howl. Leach reaches for a pile of adjectives — "vicious, crazy, seething, maniacal" — and 1997's lone full-length, She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not, earns every one of them, a dissonant, groove-heavy slab that pointed the way for later bands like Botch and Daughters. Fittingly, it was produced by Billy Anderson, the same board wizard behind some of Neurosis's heaviest work, one more quiet thread running through Leach's picks. 4. Groundwork Leach is careful to point listeners toward the right Groundwork — the one from Tucson, Arizona, since a separate Connecticut band shared the name. Arizona's Groundwork burned bright and brief across the first half of the '90s, welding political fury to jagged, emotional hardcore, and Leach boils the sound down to three words: "insane, dirty, gnarly." All of it peaked on their only full-length, 1994's Today We Will Not Be Invisible Nor Silent, a record he happens to be personally tied to — when it got a 30th-anniversary reissue, Leach was among the friends and admirers who contributed writing to its booklet. 5. Disrupt Leach closes with the rawest pick of the bunch. Disrupt were crust-punk lifers out of Lynn, Massachusetts — "Boston's finest," in his words, and the ones he's most plainly stoked on ("straight up, pissed off... love it"). Across a run that stretched from the late '80s into the early '90s, they fired off politically charged d-beat and grindcore at maximum velocity, and their sole full-length, 1994's Unrest, crams thirty tracks of anti-authoritarian fury into one scorched-earth listen — a record that helped define American crust before its members carried that weight into the pioneering sludge of Grief.