Trivium frontman Matt Heafy wouldn’t blame fans for being skeptical about the direction of the band’s ninth studio album, What the Dead Men Say. The Orlando metal quartet has thrown several sonic curveballs over its two-decade tenure, and it’s the fans’ jobs to keep up.
“I think sometimes we give people whiplash,” the singer and guitarist says. “Which I like, because there are a lot of bands that make the same record every time—some of which are great, some of which eventually get stale. So what I like about the Trivium sound is that you don’t know what you’re gonna get.”
Trivium formed in 1999 and catapulted to the forefront of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal with its 2005 sophomore album, Ascendancy, a virtuosic thrash/metalcore hybrid that found the band members—half of whom were still teenagers—hailed as the heirs apparent to Metallica’s mainstream metal throne. Across eight albums, from 2003’s Ember to Inferno to 2017’s The Sin and the Sentence, the band has traversed metalcore, death metal, hardcore, thrash and arena rock. On What the Dead Men Say, Trivium distills 20 years of melody, brutality and experimentation into an album that evokes every phase of its career.
“With this album, we really wanted to go back to the old ethos of where we would be at when we were making a record,” Heafy says. “For Ember, Ascendancy, Shogun, In Waves, Sin and Dead Men, that place was ‘make the kind of music we want to hear.’ Let’s not think, ‘Are people gonna like this? Are people gonna dislike this?’ Let’s just make the kind of music that makes us excited.”
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Heafy deliberately excludes three albums from that list: 2006’s The Crusade, 2013’s Vengeance Falls and 2015’s Silence in the Snow. All three efforts divided fans and critics for different reasons: The Crusade eschewed Ascendancy‘s metalcore elements in lieu of a full-throttle thrash attack; Vengeance Falls emphasized singsong hooks and economical song structures and sported production by Disturbed’s David Draiman; and Silence in the Snow featured entirely clean singing as a result of Heafy’s 2014 vocal blowout. While the singer is still proud of all three albums, he admits the band strayed from its most fruitful songwriting practices on them.
“Those were the three times in our history where we decided, ‘Let’s stay in a lane, let’s stay over here and let’s not get too far this way or this way or that way,'” Heafy says. “And I feel like when we do that with Trivium, we still made really great songs and great records, but it’s not fully what we’re meant to do. What we’re meant to do is allow everything that we love to influence us, allow anything and everything to happen.”
That indiscriminate songwriting approach is evident throughout What the Dead Men Say, which makes bedfellows of blistering double-bass breakdowns, blood-curdling screams, pyrotechnic guitar solos and melodies that demand to be screamed by 50,000 fans at open-air festivals. The title track opens with slabs-of-steel riffing and Gojira-esque pick scrapes before segueing into a thrashy verse anchored by Heafy’s melodic roar. Sweeping lead single “Catastrophist” alternates between quasi-power metal choruses, somber verses and a whiplash-inducing bridge chock-full of blast beats and tempo changes. Perhaps nowhere is the fusion of old and new Trivium more apparent than “The Defiant,” which melds Ascendancy-era verse riffs and full-throated clean choruses before revving into a key change that finds Heafy scraping the high end of his vocal range.
The members of Trivium wrote What the Dead Men Say with one audience in mind: themselves. They gave up long ago on trying to dazzle critics, who, after deifying them on Ascendancy, pronounced them dead in the water on The Crusade. But retooling the band’s sound after a smashing global success was just one of many examples of Trivium refusing to rest on its laurels. “In the U.K., on Ascendancy, was the only time in Trivium history that we were ever a press band,” Heafy says. “We were hailed as the greatest band on the planet at the moment. However, on the next record, I decided to rebel against our band, and I said, ‘Let’s make a record that is the exact opposite of the previous.’ I said, ‘We just did all this. We nailed it. Let’s show the world what else we can do.'”
At the same time, Trivium’s contemporaries didn’t take kindly to the fact that a group of teenagers had exploded past them in popularity. “They didn’t like seeing a bunch of 18-, 19-year-olds saying, ‘We’re going to be the next biggest band in the world’ and magazines echoing that. So we got bullied a lot on other tours coming up,” Heafy recalls. “It didn’t make sense to me why people were like, ‘Oh, these guys aren’t a metal band.’ And I think they truly were going off the way we looked. I was 18, 19. I’m pretty sure no one looked that cool at 18, 19 years old.”
Heafy doesn’t harbor resentment over these lashings; in fact, he talks about them with an air of defiance. It’s no wonder why: Sold-out shows and robust album sales speak louder than petty insults, and Trivium has outlasted many of the NWOAHM acts that came up at the turn of the century. The band members are now in their thirties, and many of their heroes have become their peers, as evidenced by a summer trek with Megadeth, Lamb of God and In Flames that, for now, is still scheduled to kick off on June 12.
When Trivium is off the road, Heafy stays connected to fans by streaming on Twitch twice a day, five days a week. What started as a hobby three years ago has blossomed into a second career, with Heafy primarily streaming his guitar and vocal practice regimen and sprinkling in some gaming. The platform allows Heafy to show fans another side of himself when he’s not playing the role of a tough-as-nails metal frontman.
“When I was a kid, [I would have loved] if [James] Hetfield would’ve had something like this, if one of my heroes would’ve had a channel I could watch daily instead of watching TV and see what it takes for them to keep their vocal chops up, their guitar chops up, see what kind of personality they have,” Heafy says. “For people to be able to come in here, I can be myself, I connect, I can tell jokes, I can mess up. My voice squeaked today. I laughed about it on the stream. Those are the things that can happen, and it’s a very natural, comfortable environment.”
Heafy joined Trivium when he was 13 years old. He’s 34 now, and he’s got the operation of his band down to a science. He can plot each point in the band’s trajectory over the last 15 years, noting which albums advanced or impeded Trivium’s career in different parts of the world. But for all his studiousness, Heafy still can’t quite identify Trivium’s place in the pantheon of heavy metal—and he prefers it that way.
“Any time we try to think about our place or how we fit in is when things strangely feel contrived, just like the concept of how we write songs,” he says. “We just exist on our own planet, because the four of us have only ever had ourselves and our fans.”