TRIVIUM Guitarist: 'When We Do A Record, We Want It To Feel Important'

Prior to TRIVIUM's November 7 performance at Toronto's Danforth Hall, guitarist Corey Beaulieu was interviewed by Alex Stojanovic of Metal Master Kingdom. The full chat can be viewed below. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET):

On why the band keeps a low public profile while they're recording:

Corey: "We see how a lot of other bands do things, and things we don't like personally about how bands release information. When we do a record, we want it to feel important. We don't want to be constantly be posting Instagram pictures, dicking off in the studio where it's nothing really to benefit from that. I think bands, there's something beneficial about going away for a minute and not constantly bombarding people, so when you do go quiet and just kind of do our thing, when we do come back out with something, it's not like people have been sick of hearing about us or seeing us post about something. If you post stuff in the studio, people are always going to be like, 'I want to hear something. Post something. I want to hear a clip.' [We] bypass that. All the content we put out, we put a lot of time into making the making-of stuff and the presentation of showing behind-the-scenes stuff in the studio really cool. And then when we do release the song, it gets people talking. They don't expect it — they don't know what's coming. It adds like a surprise [factor]. I think it has a little bit more of an impact than people hearing about something for five months and then just kind of losing interest."

On why the band decided to record a new version of "Pillars Of Serpents", a track from TRIVIUM's 2003 debut "Ember To Inferno", as a bonus track for the Japanese edition of new album "The Sin And The Sentence":

Corey: "We were really prepared, and we got in the studio and pretty much recorded the whole record in, like, two weeks. We had, I think, two, three more weeks booked in the studio, so there was a lot of just, kind of like, reviewing and going over stuff. Matt [Heafy] did a lot of stuff with the vocals, re-recording stuff over and over again, because it just kept sounding better. We were doing a lot of stuff just kind of making — once we got all the bulk of the work done, it was a lot of making sure everything was exactly the way we wanted it. One day, we were in the studio, and I can't remember what was going on, but we were all just kind of hanging out in the control room. I believe [bassist] Paolo [Gregoletto] brought up the idea — like, 'Hey, we have all this extra time, and usually, the label is always asking us for extra songs for different formats.' We had two songs we knew were going to be extra, and then we had another original song which we at the time thought was going to go on the record. Since we had just done the last tour in Europe with [drummer] Alex [Bent] and we were playing 'Pillars', that's like, 'If we were going to re-record anything, it was like something from the first album because Paolo and I didn't play on it, so it'd be kind of a cool thing to have the new version and plus the original recording is maybe not as potent as the follow-ups. It wasn't recorded with click tracks, so there's a lot of timing fluctuations. So we're like, If we're going to re-record anything from the old catalog, this would probably be something that would add something special to it, having the current band all play on an old song, and also we could beef it up a little bit. When you listen to that record, Matt's, like, 16 when he recorded it, so the vocals, he sounds really young. It was kind of like a new, hyper, high-octane version of the song. We had fun playing it with Alex on tour and felt that it'd just be a really cool song to re-record. It just seemed like a cool song that I think the old-school fans would really get into. I think it does honor the original, but it's a fresh take."

TRIVIUM's eighth album, "The Sin And The Sentence" — the band's first featuring Bent — was released in October via Roadrunner. The disc was recorded with producer Josh Wilbur (LAMB OF GOD, GOJIRA) at Santa Ana, California's Hybrid Studios.