Every band you saw in a van between 2005 and 2010 was chasing this record. Some of them knew it. Most of them thought they had come up with it themselves.
Killswitch Engage put The End of Heartache out on Roadrunner on 11 May 2004. Twelve tracks, forty two minutes, two of them short instrumentals. Adam Dutkiewicz produced it and played lead guitar, Joel Stroetzel played rhythm, Mike D'Antonio played bass, Justin Foley drummed, and Howard Jones sang. It was recorded at Zing Studios in Massachusetts over the winter of 2003 and mixed by Andy Sneap in England.
The important thing on that list is Jones. Jesse Leach had left in 2002, mid-tour, and Jones had been fronting the band live for about two years without having made a record with them. So this album had a job before anybody wrote a note: prove the band still worked. That is a horrible position to write from and you can hear that it did not slow them down at all.
Here is what the record actually does. Take a heavy verse. Put a huge clean melodic chorus on top of it. Do it every time, without apology, and mix the chorus loud. That was not new in 2004, plenty of bands had tried it, but nobody had done it with a singer who could genuinely sing. Jones has real range and real control, and when he goes up on "The End of Heartache" it does not sound like a heavy band's guy attempting a nice bit. It sounds like a singer.
"Rose of Sharyn" is the one everyone names first and it earned that: the riff is simple, the chorus is enormous, and it lands in ninety seconds. "When Darkness Falls" is the one that builds, and it is the best structured thing here. "A Bid Farewell" is the one that goes hardest and reminds you where these guys came from. "Take This Oath" is the one that would have been a single for any band with less material.
Whether you like this album mostly depends on whether you think a chorus is a betrayal.
Because it does divide people, and hard. Go on Metal Archives and you will find reviews calling it boring, a melodic experiment, lacking in riffs, one of the worst albums ever made. Go to the magazines and you will find it named a foundation of American metal. Both crowds are describing the exact same feature: the clean choruses. One hears a band writing songs, the other hears a band going soft.
One detail that gets skipped: this was Justin Foley's first record with the band as well as Jones's, so two fifths of the group were new, and Dutkiewicz was producing his own band through it while playing lead guitar on it. That is a lot of jobs for one person and a lot of new blood for an album with everything to prove, and none of the strain shows up on the tape.
My call is simple and it has nothing to do with whether this counts as real metal. Get this record in a room. Play "Rose of Sharyn" to four hundred people at a club show and watch what the room does. It moves. All of it, all the way to the back, including the people at the merch table. That is not a small achievement and it is the only test I care about.
What it also did, and this is fair to hold against it, is give a template to about a thousand bands who took the shape without the songs. For a decade afterwards every second band had the screamed verse, the sung chorus, the breakdown before the last one, and almost none of them had a singer who could do what Jones does. The record is not responsible for its imitators. But you cannot write the history of metalcore's worst period without starting here, and any honest fan of this album has to hold both facts at once.
Twenty years on it still sounds enormous, mostly because Sneap mixed it to sound enormous and the songs deserved it. If you only ever hear one album from this scene, this is the one, and the argument about whether that is a compliment has been running ever since.