Killswitch Engage's Mike D'Antonio on Cro-Mags Stabbing: "Leave the Violence on the Dance Floor"

I see now, with like the poetry of our singer Jesse Leach that the positive message can go off without being forced. That it can have meaning. So hopefully we're contributing, and we do have people say we helped them through a really hard time so it's rewarding.

I read you're a vegetarian, are you into animal rights?

I am a vegetarian, but not an animal rights activist. I've been vegetarian for 22 years. It's just something I believe in. The rest of the band eats meat. I'm not the type of guy that says don't do this or that.

You got some real hardcore punk roots, how'd you first get into it?

I had a cousin that used to skateboard way before I knew what that even was. He got me into Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Misfits, and Dead Milkmen. I fell in love instantly with skateboarding and the punk rock that went with it. And then just flipping through magazines and seeing what band T-shirts the guys in skateboarding were wearing, remember this is way before the internet, I went to the store and you had to hope you were buying the right thing just by looking at the logos and artwork and stuff. There were a lot of misses and hits in those days.

My musical influences are still Cro-Mags, Leeway, Agnostic Front, Madball, and Bad Brains. I listen to them daily, and they're truly dear to my heart.

What's your favorite thing about Bad Brains?

Compared to every other band, they stand alone. How they wrote music and the way HR sounds like no other. People try to copy, but no one can particularly get it right. I'm not sure what his influences were, it just made sense to me. He's just cool.

The first album is my favorite and then Quickness, which a lot of people hate, but I love the blend of hardcore and metal, and the blurring of lines between that started really happening in the '90s.

What about a band like DRI out of Houston, Texas?

I had the Crossover album, but I was never a huge fan of thrash. I thought it was like, hokey. I like metal, hardcore, and punk rock. I thought thrash was weak.

(954) 449-1025, tix $29 adv, $32 day of show, June 4, 6:30pm