Watch: Howard Jones Reunites With Killswitch Engage on Stage at ‘Summer of Loud’ Fest

Attendees at the Summer of Loud fest in Florida got a big surprise this past weekend when Killswitch Engage brought out their former vocalist, Howard Jones, to perform with them.

During their headlining set at the Tampa music festival, the crowd was greeted by the surprise of Jones — currently the frontman for Light the Torch — hopping on stage to sing some songs alongside his ex-bandmates and longtime KsE vocalist Jesse Leach. Check out footage of the set below!

Howard Jones left Killswitch in 2012, after being with the band since 2002. Notably, he’d replaced Leach, who was the band’s founding vocalist in 1999. When he left in ’02, Jones stepped in. After recording three studio albums with the band, not to mention constant world touring, Jones exited KsE after 10 years, and Leach ended up coming back into the fray.

Leach has been the band’s frontman for the past 13 years, performing on their last four albums. This included the most recent record, This Consequence, which was released in February.

In a previous interview with United Rock Nations, Leach opened up about working on the new labuym and, when asked what the biggest challenge was in making the new record, he replied: “I think for me wanting to be, and I use this word loosely, relevant, but relevant to me and my bandmembers.”

“I wanted what I had to say to excite them, but I also needed it to be genuine,” Leach continued. “I needed it to be something that when I looked at those lyrics, I thought, ‘Yes. That’s exactly what I wanna say.’”

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“I went through — I don’t know — seven, eight songs where I was kind of just throwing it out to see what would stick,” Leach continued, sharing that his KsE bandmates were very transparent about their thoughts and feelings on his new lyrics. “And those guys were, like, ‘This doesn’t feel like you’re really giving us your best.’ So having that sort of rejection from them initially was very hard.”

“It sort of felt like I was becoming insecure. I was wondering if I had it in me,” Leach went on to share. “But that turned into a determination to rediscover myself as a writer, to go deeper, to tap into things that I never tapped in before, and to sort of look outside of myself. I mean, after everything we’ve been through, there’s so much to draw from. There’s so much to pull from.”

Click here for the full interview, and click here for all of Killswitch Engage’s upcoming tour dates.