TRIVIUM Frontman On Next Album: 'Everyone's Gonna Be Very Surprised'

Simon Milburn of Australia's The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with TRIVIUM frontman Matt Heafy. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On how the band's latest album, "The Crusade", has been received:

"Everything's been great. Everything that we've seen has been awesome. We're very happy with what everyone's saying and we're very pleased with it. We're looking forward to getting the new one out. We're gonna start doing that one real soon. We've got a shitload of songs written already, and we're gonna demo them in September and record them in January through June or July or some shit. I guess half of next year or something. We'll get it out probably third quarter, if not fourth quarter of next year."

On the musical direction of the follow-up to "The Crusade":

"It's gonna be… I guess the only way I can describe it, because it is pretty early in the writing process, is that everyone's gonna be very surprised, but very happily surprised. There's a lot of stuff going on. I gotta be just that vague."

On the shift in direction on "The Crusade", most notably when it came down to Heafy's vocals:

"We just took it naturally. It wasn't a conscious thing. It was just clearly where things just naturally progressed to. Every record to us sounds very different. The next one will sound completely different to the last one which is different from the other ones but it still sounds like TRIVIUM. I guess the biggest thing people were saying was about the vocal thing. When I first sang in TRIVIUM, I was 14. I couldn't sing. I sounded like shit. The only thing I could do was scream. I wanted a singer. We couldn't find anyone else. I could scream, so I did it. I did it originally as the main vocals, and as soon as the singing got good enough to do on its own, I kept adding a little more singing, a little more singing, and nailed it. Finally, I was doing just singing live, y'know, some of the old stuff I shifted around along the lines of that singing, but I'm still advancing it. It's not as clean as it was on 'The Crusade', but it's even heavier now… it's more of a grubbier, distorted vocal. But on the albums, I'll do screaming, whatever is appropriate and I guess, it's a whole lot of experimentation – doing what we feel the music calls for."

On being considered part of the so-called "metalcore" movement:

"I'm gonna have to shoot that down. I'm gonna have to shoot that term down, because metalcore is the combination of metal and hardcore, and the four of us have never been into hardcore at all. We don't have hardcore in our roots. It's pretty much metal, and I'd say that… I definitely know which you want to talk about for 'Ember' and 'Ascendancy', where as the rhythm guitar has more of a melodic thing going on, with the vocals still screaming. But then on 'The Crusade', I was definitely saying to have that melodic guitar playing going on over the melodic vocals, it wouldn't make much sense. So that's why the guitars parts are less about the melody itself and more about the riff. The metalcore term, it's just been a curse that happened in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, but you can see that all those bands that were tagged that have kinda died out. Y'know, it was all metal. 'Ascendancy' has a shit load of thrash and stuff. It just had more melodic riffs. And 'The Crusade' has got more traditional riffs on somethings, but there are some songs that are even more melodic than anything that we've ever had, like 'And Sadness Will Sear' or 'This World Can't Tear Us Apart'."

On the band's growing popularity:

"Things have been good. We don't see it as a popularity thing but we definitely are happy for the fact that we've got more people now that like to share our music with us and have a good time with this band. It's just great to be able to with a lot of people who just want to have a good time. That's all that we're about. We're not about who can do what better than what or who's doing what better than what. We're about just having a good time. We don't care who you are or what you're into, but as long as you just wanna have a good time and just rock out, then that's what we're here for."

Read the entire interview at The Metal Forge.