Trivium

FUSING TOGETHER ALL THE BEST ELEMENTS EXPLORED ACROSS THEIR 20-PLUS YEAR LEGACY, MATT HEAFY AND CO. HAVE CONJURED UP THE DEFINITIVE TRIVIUM ALBUM WITH WHAT THE DEAD MEN SAY. THE IDIOSYNCRATIC FRONTMAN RIFFS ON WHAT MAKES LP9 SUCH A SPECIAL RELEASE FOR THE BAND, AND HOW STREAMING HAS CHANGED HIS LIFE OUTSIDE OF IT.

Matt Heafy is one insanely busy bloke. When he’s not taking care of his two young children or hanging out with his wife, he’s either tearing shit up as the face-melting frontman in Trivium, working on his signature guitars with the fine folk at Epiphone, studying the relentless techniques of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or streaming his heart out on Twitch. In fact, Heafy’s streaming habits have made him an internet legend of sorts – whether he’s gaming, performing music, running clinics or just shooting the shit and answering fan questions, Heafy’s twice-a-day, five-day-a-week broadcasts gather tens of thousands of viewers apiece.

Despite streaming on a regular basis since 2017, Heafy somehow managed to conjure up an entire Trivium album without spilling the beans to a legion of Fortnite fanboys. What The Dead Men

Say is album number nine for the Floridian heavy metallers, and it’s a cataclysmic culmination of everything they’ve been leading the metalcore scene at large with since 1999.

That’s thanks in no small part to Heafy’s streaming side-hustle, too – because he’s constantly revisiting his entire catalogue for acoustic jams and fan requests, he’s never too far deep into one singular era of Trivium; he lives and breathes their entire two-decade legacy, and by proxy, when it comes time to put pen to paper, he’s able to reflect on every record he’s worked on thus far to calculate the perfect next step.

When we get Heafy on the phone to chat about What The Dead Men Say, he’s in particularly high spirits – something we can’t say for many of the interviews in this issue, given how hard the music industry has been hit by the Coronavirus pandemic. See, not too much has changed for old mate Matt: Trivium can’t tour right now, and we’re both in agreement that such is a major bummer, but there’s a definitively bright upside in that he can still perform for his hordes of fans on Twitch.

Heafy still has this enormous platform – an established one, at that – where he can share his talents and connect one-on-one with those who love his content. And especially now, he’s taking full advantage of that.

So, how’s your slice of the world dealing with The Plague 2: Electric Boog a-flu?

It’s sort of business as usual for me. I mean, it really stinks that this is happening and I’m definitely encouraging all of my followers to embrace social distancing – let’s make this thing pass as quickly as possible by being smart and vigilant – but I started streaming on Twitch about three years ago, so I’ve basically had the infrastructure set up since 2017.

I’ve been streaming twice a day, five days a week off tour, and then seven days a week on tour. So now a lot of newcomers are visiting the channel and realising, “Oh, Matt’s had this thing going on for a while.” So the entertainment isn’t stopping, the Trivium music isn’t stopping, and people seem very happy.

How have you found it having such a unique outlet to express yourself away from the confines of a band, and also connect with your fans in such a personal way?

It’s been fantastic! And because I’m playing Trivium songs for Trivium fans, I’m getting better at what I do – I have become a better singer, screamer and guitar player thanks to streaming. Because it’s three-to-six hours a day, at least five days a week, of just rehearsing stuff.

Typically – and I’m sure it’s the same with many musicians – the case is that it’s only right before a tour or before you head into the studio that you decide to start getting into shape. But now, if I had to go on tour tomorrow or suddenly start making a record, I’m always in shape vocally and with my guitar playing. I’ve got, like, 95 percent of our entire discography memorised, and that’s just a side-effect of playing it all the time on stream.

Does streaming stimulate you creatively?

I’m sure it’s like anything, y’know? There are good days and there are bad days. I’ve always been regimented by practise, but let’s say there was ever a day where I didn’t feel like doing it – that’s a tricky pothole to navigate around. But because I have this community and because I have a schedule – I know that there are people out there depending on me – I make sure that I’m always there and being active.

And it absolutely makes practising more fun than just being in a room by myself and rehearsing stuff. There are thousands of people there daily, there to just hang out with likeminded people and have a good time, request songs and enjoy the content.

Twitch is mainly a gaming platform, but about 75-to-95 percent of the time when I’m streaming, it’s music. I recorded this one song where I basically wrote the entire thing – guitars, vocals, drums, and recorded absolutely every second of it – while streaming. I can’t say what that song’s for yet, but that was an incredible experience. I really enjoy what I do. And y’know, being a frontman, I feel like you should enjoy entertaining people.

In the press release for What The Dead Men Say, you describe it as having “all the ingredients of past, present and future Trivium.” What makes this the definitive Trivium album in your eyes?

It feels like the definitive Trivium album when I listen to it and I see evidence of that statement. I see ingredients of records one through eight on this record, and you can’t say that for records one through seven; with every single one of those records, we did something very different, never really knowing what we were heading towards. But with record eight[ The Sin And The Sentence ], I felt like that was a great summary of everything we had done before. And with record nine, it’s a summary of everything we’d done on one through eight.

It wasn’t a conscious decision – nobody came to us and said, “Hey, let’s do this…” It was a matter of making music from a place of not thinking, “Are people going to like this?” We were just making the kind of music that we felt like we wanted to make; the kind of music that made us excited to play.

And what’s great was that we never told anybody the entire time that we were recording, and we were able to present both of these last two records in really unique ways and build anticipation in a way that I feel is challenging nowadays. It’s hard to find new ways to be exciting and mysterious when you’re broadcasting yourself to the world five days a week, six hours a day. But I was able to find that time and place where we could build up as something exciting for our fans.