Jesse Leach has put a question to his own band in public, and the arithmetic behind it is the kind nobody in a Killswitch Engage interview usually says out loud.
Speaking to the Australian outlet Heavy, the singer said he would find it liberating to release an EP or a couple of songs rather than build everything around another full album. His reasoning is what the touring cycle actually does to a record. "You put out a record, and how many of those songs do you actually play live? Maybe four, maybe five," he said. "So those other songs just kind of go by the wayside."
His alternative is to write the four that will survive and stop there. "Why not just put out an EP with four songs that you for sure are gonna play live," he said. "It just cuts out the fat, I guess, and makes the touring cycle easier and more frequent."
He is careful about the format itself. "We're old school, for sure. We all love the format of an album and the concept of an album, but I think you can pull it off in four or five songs as well."
None of it is decided. Leach calls himself one of five and says he respects whatever the others write, while making his own preference clear: he is rooting for the hard, heavy and fast end of it.