Metal
Trivium release “Crown In The Grave” on 20 November through Roadrunner Records and have put out the title track, with a video directed by Pavel Trebukhin. It is the band’s eleventh album and it arrives five years after “In The Court Of The Dragon”, from 2021.
The line-up is Matthew K. Heafy (vocals and guitar), Corey Beaulieu (guitar), Paolo Gregoletto (bass) and Alex Rüdinger (drums), who joins officially: he had come close to signing up in 2015 and then let it go. They recorded at The Hangar, their own room in Orlando, the first time they have made a record at home. Josh Wilbur returns as producer and Jacob Hansen mixes for them for the first time.
Gregoletto says the starting point was a film. “Kurosawa took Macbeth and set it in a feudal Japan,” he says of “Throne Of Blood”, released in 1957. “There’s minimal dialogue, yet the storyline is powerful. There are these haunting elements of being tempted by fate and this man’s downfall.” From there they moved into Japanese horror and cinema of the fifties, sixties and seventies, an influence that according to the bassist “became a set of guardrails for the music, lyrics, artwork, and overall identity of the record”.
Heafy comes to it after a run of mental health struggles, physical injuries and anxiety. “Facing yourself is the final quest,” he says. “We had to do it as a band, and I had to do it in my personal life. I freed my mind from the constraints of being worried. I made a decision to just sing.” He went into therapy and found a medication regimen that worked: “I stopped trying to be safe and perfect at every show. Instead, I was actually enjoying the experience and living. If I messed up, it was okay because I’m human.”
There are twelve tracks, opening with “Jorōgumo” and closing with “Serpent In The Flame”. Gregoletto says they used nineties records as a reference for the choruses: Metallica’s “The Black Album”, Megadeth’s “Countdown To Extinction” and Soundgarden’s “Superunknown”.
The band start a North American tour on 5 November in St. Petersburg, Florida, running to 19 December in Charlotte, North Carolina, with In Flames, Orbit Culture, Fit For An Autopsy and Frozen Soul. No European dates have been announced.
Text by Roger Estivill