Joel Stroetzel

Joel Stroetzel — born in the United States in 1980 — has been Killswitch Engage's guitarist since 1999, forming with Adam Dutkiewicz the pair that holds up the band's sound. His function is metalcore's melodic counterpoint. The genre is defined by alternation between heavy riff and singable chorus, and that demands two things of the guitars at once: syncopated weight in a low register and lines harmonised in thirds that give the track its melodic character. Stroetzel and Dutkiewicz have worked in that division for more than twenty-five years — a direct inheritance from Swedish melodic death metal applied to American song structures. He was on the whole discography, from Alive or Just Breathing (2002) to This Consequence (2025), crossing Jesse Leach's two spells and Howard Jones's decade. Alongside bassist Mike D'Antonio, he is one of the elements that guaranteed continuity in a band that changed singers twice in positions of very high exposure. In a band whose producer and principal composer occupies the foreground, he is the guitarist who ensures the melodic half of the format works — structural work that rarely appears in the headline credits.