My parents would leave my brother and I at home to go to a Bible thing… The moment they would leave, those cassette tapes would go into the boombox and we would sing word for word.”

Jesse Leach on stage. He is cupping the top of his microphone, and is singing with a passionate expression.

Images: Elsie Roymans / Getty

Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach has looked back on his religious upbringing, and how one of his first metal albums was destroyed by his father before his very eyes.

Despite his parents being rather unhappy about discovering an Iron Maiden tape in their home during the time of Satanic Panic as a Christian family, the metalcore vocalist says that if anything, the forbidden “devil’s music” just felt “more appealing” to him.

Speaking to Metal Hammer for its new print edition, Leach remembers, “For the most part I had a pretty damn good childhood. My parents did a great job of masking our poverty from us. But a lot of my childhood was just three times a week at church. My father was studying to be a minister, so when I was very young, it was a lot of travelling to different churches, him and my mom trying to find the right spiritual home for us.”

Asked how he began to discover heavy music, Leach explains, “My brother brought home a couple of tapes – he smuggled them in! One of them was Anthrax’s I’m The Man and the other was [Iron Maiden’s] The Number Of The Beast. We were aged 10 or 11, and my parents would leave my brother and I at home to go to a Bible thing. We didn’t have to go anymore, thankfully – we’d stay home and do our homework. The moment they would leave, those cassette tapes would go into the boombox and we would sing word for word.”

He adds, “Fast forward to a couple of weeks later, my mother’s cleaning my brother’s room, lifting the mattress – back then the mattress was the place to hide all your stuff – and she finds it. During that time, with Satanic Panic, we knew the worst thing in the world you could do was bring in The Number Of The Beast. My dad took the tape in front of us, put it on the ground and smashed it: ‘I’m forbidding Devil’s music in my house!’ But that only made it more appealing.”