TRIVIUM Bassist Says Next Album Will Be 'Heavier' Than 'In Waves'

On February 27, Brendan Crabb of Australia's Loud magazine conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Corey Beaulieu and bassist Paolo Gregoletto of Florida metallers TRIVIUM. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Loud: Where do you see the next TRIVIUM album headed?

Paolo: I think it's going to be heavier.

Corey: Angry (laughs).

Loud: (Laughs) What are you angry at right now?

Paolo: We've been talking about it a lot, just a lot of stuff, like where we want to go with the next record. I think we've definitely learnt to write better on the road and we're learning that writing with a more focused vision musically is the way to go. Not just all of us just writing as many songs as we can. I think we're all trying to be conscious of how much we're writing, what we're writing and really just spending the time with a smaller batch of songs, rather than writing like 40 songs and kinda being all over the place musically. But it's definitely I think going to be a heavier record.

Loud: It's a case of quality over quantity then.

Paolo: I mean, the last record, we had so much time; we had like two years and we wrote an album over the course of two drummers, so it was like, when we started writing we were in a different headspace than when we actually recorded. So we had a lot of material, which was great. But I think now that things have smoothed out on the personal side of things for the band, I think we can focus solely on just the musical vision of what TRIVIUM is and really have no, outside of the musical stuff we have nothing going on that's kinda like drawing from that.

Corey: Also, on (2006's) "The Crusade", (2008's) "Shogun" and (2011's) "In Waves", we just wrote so much stuff that was like just trying different ideas, to try and see what we could do. I think with those records, even before we recorded, like, demo-wise, there was some stuff that was like way over here, and then there was some stuff over here. And now it's like we kinda know, "Okay, that definitely sounds like us, it's not too out of the box," and you know, what's not even worth kind of digging into. Like, it just won't fit the vibe of the record, the riff just doesn't sound like TRIVIUM.

Loud: Or sounds too much like another band perhaps?

Paolo: Just like, if it's… On this record, particularly, we had a tonne of demos and it was really not sounding like other people, it was just, "Is this too extreme, or is this too soft? Is this not even really in the ballpark of what we're trying to do?" I think the only reason we had so much stuff is like I said, we had too much time on our hands really. [Laughs] And it was good, it was like, especially when we had Nick [Augusto, drums] in the band, we hit this new creative spurt where we just kept writing and demoing and at the end of the first month of demoing we had like 14, 15 songs, and we just kept going. It was a lot of stuff and when we demoed, like, two or three times in a row it was just sort of like overkill with the demos. That was one lesson we learnt with this record; my only critique of the whole process of "In Waves" is we demoed too much.

Corey: Also, if you write way too many songs you have to write lyrics, vocal ideas and all the other stuff, and you kinda spread yourself too thin. We cut a lot of stuff… Not necessarily that some of the songs were bad; there was some cool shit. But it's like, "What do we want to present to everybody with this record?" We narrowed it down to certain songs and we just focused on those, because if you spread yourself too thin, a song that could be great might not get enough attention and be like, "Oh, it's pretty good, but look where we could take it if we put the energy into it." So that's why with this record, it was like, we don't need 30 songs. If we get 12 or 13 great songs and from day one just focus on those, we can just make 'em just like motherfuckers. [Laughs]

Paolo: That's it, like motherfuckers (laughs). Motherfuckers!

Corey: It's like you don't need a fucking single. Fuck a single — you want like a fucking record, a full record of songs.

Paolo: A full album that must be heard, start to finish, a complete thought. I think it's also going to be the first clean slate with Nick totally in mind for playing the drums. A lot of the songs, like "Inception Of The End" was, like, the first song that was written and that was two years before we pushed "record." So when that song was written, Travis [Smith] was playing drums amd it was a totally different mindset of us playing and writing a certain way to when Nick came into the band. So this is the first time that we're going to hand Nick however many songs it is we end up getting demoed on the computer and be like, "Alright, dude, here you go, go insane. We're not tying your hands back, just fucking go for it."

Read the entire interview from Loud magazine.