‘What The Dead Men Say’ is getting closer.
Trivium have released the third song from their upcoming new album ‘What The Dead Men Say’.
Have a listen to ‘Amongst The Shadows & The Stones’ below:
It follows on from ‘Catastrophist’:
And the album’s title track:
‘What The Dead Men Say’ is set for release on April 24 via Roadrunner Records.
We recently spoke to vocalist Matt Heafy all about the album’s creation. You can read the full thing HERE but here’s a little snippet to wet you appetite:
When you were first gearing up for this record, how would you describe your mentality – the game-plan for this one, if you like? This album feels like a real synthesis of everything Trivium has been, and more besides.
“That’s really nailed it. Making [‘17’s] ‘The Sin And The Sentence’, we went through our career and looked at everything we thought we’d done right and done wrong. That record captured the best bits of all the other albums we’d done before, and ‘What The Dead Men Say’ also collects everything from ‘The Sin…’ and back. What I noticed from really scrutinising everything we’ve ever done was, I looked across all my, top, favourite Trivium records: ‘The Sin…’, ‘In Waves’, ‘Shogun’, ‘Ascendancy’, ‘From Ember To Inferno’. And with those records specifically, we created music amongst the four of us in a room, before allowing anything else to happen.
“Before sitting with a producer or going into the studio, we made sure that we could play the music from start to finish by muscle memory, that I could sing it and scream it, that we had at least 90% of the vocal melodies and lyrics written before we were ready to go into the studio. The three others that I put towards the bottom of my favourites – because they’re all my favourites I guess! – and are very tough on, are ‘Vengeance Falls’, ‘Silence In The Snow’ and ‘The Crusade’- and with those three, we made the conscious decision to stay within a lane of Trivium’s sound.”
How so?
“‘The Crusade’, in particular, was a decision by me to rebel entirely against everything that ‘Ascendancy’ had been. As great as ‘Ascendancy’ was, and everything exploding for us in the UK off of that record, I looked around and went, ‘Alright, we just did all of this. Every other band in the world is now also doing this’. I’m not saying that we created that formula, but back then I was like, ‘Everyone’s screaming and singing, doing breakdowns and solos and double bass, let’s do the opposite of that: more akin to the ‘80s influence of where we come from’. We became like a classic metal band, and saw that the UK was pretty shocked by it. But the rest of the world started picking up on it, that’s where Iron Maiden took us on tour and Europe started opening up for us. It’s always an interesting time when I’m talking to the UK press, because the time of ‘Ascendancy’ in the UK was the only time and place that our band were on every magazine cover and winning all the awards. It was ‘Ascendancy’ in the UK, and after that it’s really, truly been built off the base of our supporters.
“It was so great that the UK gave us that shot and Download worked, even though we showed up onstage not warmed up and had only woken up 30 minutes before, were rusty and not sure if we could pull it off. But somehow it all just clicked in and everything happened right. So I feel like with these past few records, especially the latest one, there have been times when we’ve been reflective over everything. But there have also been times where we haven’t been pulling from anything specific. We’ve gotten back into the mindset of ‘Ascendancy’ and ‘From Ember To Inferno’, which was that we were just making the kind of music that made us feel good and excited to play. When we made ‘Ascendancy’ we didn’t have fans or supporters, no one knew who we were, so we just made the kind of music that made us feel something. That’s where we’ve been at with this new record. Not staying in or out of a lane, just allowing anything and everything to happen.”