TRIVIUM Frontman: Every One Of Our Albums Sounds Pretty Different

Liz Ramanand of Loudwire recently conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Matt Heafy of Florida-based metallers TRIVIUM. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Loudwire: How would you compare "In Waves" to the rest of the TRIVIUM albums?

Heafy: I think the big thing with our sound is that every album sounds pretty different. People typically don't know what to expect when listening to one of our albums. With this record, it sounds like TRIVIUM, it doesn't sound like another band, it doesn't sound like something else or some other genre, it truly just sounds like our band. I don't know what components made that happen or how a band can make that happen but it took us five records to really hone out what sound like.

Loudwire: With heavy tracks like "In Waves" and "Dusk Dismantled" throughout the album, how do you prepare your voice for songs like these?

Heafy: I never really learned a proper way of screaming. I had lessons here and there for singing and I mean I was able to pick up a little bit from every singing teacher but basically I wanted to learn the fundamentals from people. Whenever you go into a teaching-based situation with an instrument, for me at least for voice, it was kind of like that singing teacher's way or the highway and it could really put up mental blocks in your head. As far as screaming, I don't really know what I'm doing but it does the job so it's really about learning the fundamentals and how to warm up and how to sing right and just take care of yourself.

Loudwire: You guys are on tour with DREAM THEATER; what's your relationship with those guys?

Heafy: They're one of the greatest bands of all time, we've been trying to tour with them and it finally happened now. As far as [John] Petrucci goes, he's my favorite guitar player in the world. With every show we've ever done and we ever do, I always use his warm-up exercises from his VHS from the '90s and I use that a lot in my abilities when I was younger and I still use is nowadays on tour. They're about as good as they get when it comes to any musician or band. They're the best.

Loudwire: How would you describe metal music, or the industry itself, from when you first started versus now?

Heafy: Well, it changes every album. "Ascendency" was 75 percent physical sales in CDs; "In Waves" is 75 percent digital sales. So obviously the markets have been completely flipped around. The CD buying market whether digital or physical goes down 10 to 30 percent every single time we release a record and that's a worldwide scale. Metal is in a very odd spot in the U.S. and in a lot of other places in the world it's still very strong, other places it's kind of quiet, but in the U.S. right now there aren't really any new metal bands. There aren't any new bands that are coming out that were our age. Metal's kind of lost right now. The bands that are touring in metal, they've been around for a while now, there's no one new coming in and doing something different. That's why with this record, "In Waves", we wanted to do something that was completely reactionary towards what we see in our genre and pushing it beyond the boundaries of what a metal band is suppose to look like, what a metal band is suppose to sounds like and push everything to a new creative height where it's not doing things that we're suppose to do but doing things that we want to do.

Read the entire interview from Loudwire.