Trivium

Fri 5th Aug, 2011 in Features

To describe the success of Trivium over the past decade as astounding would without a doubt, be an understatement. The band had a gold record under their belt before any of the members were old enough to enter a bar, and boasted a resume that included sets opening for their heroes – Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slipknot and Machine Head – before any of the quartet had hit 25.

Five years on, two albums and a twelve month hiatus later, the Floridian metalheads have once again returned to the spotlight wielding their latest release, In Waves, that has been heralded as a return to the heaviness and aggression that the four piece had forged their fan base upon with their breakthrough album Ascendancy. Bassist Paolo Gregoletto took some time out of the bands hectic schedule to chat with FL.

So Trivium’s just started touring again after taking a year off to relax and hit the studio, how does it feel to back on the road?
You know after being off the road for over a year, it’s cool, we get to kind of let loose again, not that we didn’t have a good time off, I mean we had little bits of breaks here between writing and recording but its different, it’s sort of the lifestyle we’ve always dreamed of and I guess it’s something all four of us have looked forward to and the constant touring has kind of been our lives for the past six or seven years which we’ve gotten use to and when you’re not doing it, it’s feels really weird.

The video for In Waves hit the net a few weeks ago and has been described as epic, unconventional and profound. Would you care to shed some light on the meaning behind the clip?
Well I think Matt [Heafy] took a lot of charge in making sure that we didn’t do the normal band video. Every video we’ve done in the past we’ve played in and the guy that did the video, Ramon [Boutviseth], has done our last three which were by far our strongest videos and we were just like you know what, we challenged us with our music and our artwork, so we can’t drop the ball with our video, we have to do something different and thought provoking. We knew that some people wouldn’t be used to it and I guess that was sort of the initial idea, and after that we threw some ideas at Ramon and he kinda crafted the video around a lot of the albums imagery and he listened to the song and kind of interpreted things from the song. It was kind of a mix of things, I guess we just gave him our ideas and ran with it.

Over the years Trivium has become known for being quite stylistically diverse and have explored the realms of metalcore, thrash and even progressive metal. Where do you think In Waves fits in against your back catalogue?
Well I guess it’s really a mix of everything. I mean if you wanted to genre-fy it you’d have to do it on a song by song and a riff by riff basis because we didn’t turn a blind eye to anything that influenced us in the past. We just went totally uninhibited into the rehearsal room and we were just like what riffs do we have, what do we want to do with this song, what do we want to achieve. We didn’t leave anything off the table and that was kinda cool because some of the stuff we demo’ed was too heavy, some was too melodic or just wasn’t us and it was cool to be able to go in there with an open mind and just try some new stuff in the demo stages, and what we ended up with was thirteen songs that really encompassed everything we listened to and everything that influenced us both within and outside of music.

So Trivium doesn’t take the Dethklok approach to writing, you can write a song that’s too heavy?
Yeah I mean it’s kinda weird to say that but I think at this point we kinda know when we’re crossing the line, like this doesn’t even sound like us anymore. I mean we can pull it off now with Nick [Augusto] because he’s a phenomenal drummer and when it comes to extreme stuff, you don’t have to ask him twice to play something fast, he’ll just go for it straight away. Although just because we had the ability, we didn’t want to make Trivium a deathcore band just because we can play blast beats because we have a new drummer, we wanted to retain what made us unique and add in elements here and there and I guess we wanted to let him show his influences off as well. I mean there’s always been a real balance of heaviness and melody in our band and that’s something we never wanted to shy away from. Even in the songs full of screaming there’s definitely melodic sensibility within the music to counter the screaming.

On that note, In Waves is the first album you’ve recorded with your new drummer Nick Augusto, what kind of impact do you think he had on the final product?
Well I think he bought the energy we had when we made Ascendancy. I think it started when we started touring with him and everyone was having a good time again and everyone was enjoying themselves, and that was sort of the key to Ascendancy, we were having so much fun and had high hopes but we were just enjoying going out on tour when and playing music and we just kinda wanted to get back in touch with that and in many ways, having Nick was just like taking a breath of fresh air. His energy rubbed off against everyone in a good way and we want to keep that going for as long as we’re a band because I mean, it’s easy to get sidetracked and forget about why you’re doing something.

This was also the first time you’ve had an album produced by the legendary Colin Richardson who’s mixed a couple of your albums in the past and has worked with just about every major modern metal act, from Bullet For My Valentine to Cannibal Corpse. How do you think he shaped the record for Trivium?
Well Colin co-produced with Ginge Ford and we had Carl Bown as our engineer and the way it sorta worked out was we pretty much got a production team to record with, as opposed to just one producer because and as such we could work as a team and we avoided one person just shouting and everyone else just following in line. We were able to discuss things and argue and throw ideas around and we really talked about what we wanted to achieve, and Colin came in wanting to capture us as the best we could be sonically, not that what we’d done wasn’t good sonically, but he thought we could go even further with that and it was a very meticulous process, and he definitely threw in a lot of great songs and ideas in terms of like, “hey why don’t we go straight into the next verse”. But I guess for us, he was so meticulous with getting tones from the start that the final mix was that much better and I think he’d done so much mixing over the past few years and had moved away from production that as his second album back producing, I think he wanted to see how much better his production could make an album.

In an interview with yourself and Matt a few years back, you emphasized how you were trying to be different in recording your last record, Shogun, I mean you recorded it down in Nashville which was and is the home of Country and Western music. Has your process for writing and recording changed since your last record?
Well we sort of stripped everything back to the basics, a lot of the stuff we write on our own and we got back to being in a warehouse and rehearsing together as a band and we demoed at our warehouse and didn’t do anything until we were ready in the studio, so we pretty much spent 6 or 7 months doing that nonstop and it was cool to strip everything down and start again as a band. We kinda needed that time on our own before we bought a bunch of people in with ideas, I mean we needed to have all our ideas finalized and in order before we could really progress.

Well the first set of shows you played after returning from your hiatus was actually a run of shows in Australia supporting Disturbed, how did the Australian audiences treat you whilst down under?
Well its really only gotten better for us down there, I mean we’ve sort of inched our way up every time we’ve released a record and it’s always got a great vibe going down there with a consistent turnout of loyal fans, I mean I never had a bad time there, even when we had to fly in and out really quickly for runs of shows.

Well Disturbed is one of the many acts you guys have opened for over the years, I mean your extensive resume includes opening for Killswitch Engage, Metallica, Iron Maiden and Machine Head. Have you had any awesome or nightmare-like experiences opening for other bands?
Well really, all the tours we were on with the bands you’ve mentioned were great but to be honest like really, the worst touring experience was this tour with all these new roadrunner bands which had more drama than any other tour we’ve ever done on our way up and since then we’ve really not had many problems, I mean when you get to a certain level I think you leave all that petty shit behind and you know, it’s a business but it’s fun too and it’s a matter of enjoying what you’re doing while you can.