band.” Paolo mentions that these are the qualities he’s always sought in bands he’s liked, from Metallica to Iron Maiden. Ignoring tedious mockers who shout about Trivium being a thrash tribute band – which In Waves addresses by sounding like Trivium and no one else – it’s entirely natural for these four Floridians to be aiming where their heroes have long since reigned. Especially as they’ve seen it up close on support slots. “The next thing is to put on our show on that level with our full vision. That’s the ultimate goal. We love doing these tours with all these great bands and festivals. After seven years you start looking at the next stage. There’s no easy way and there’s no saying it will happen but how will we transition from the band that supports these big bands to being that band we’re supporting and it’s just down to nailing it each time we make an album. Make sure we did everything we could on every level.”
“We are in transition from supporting big bands to being headliners and it’s just down to nailing it each time we make a new album!”
Hence the effort to tie visuals so tightly with the album – everything from photos shoots to videos for promotional tracks or singles – something which Paolo feels has let them down before. “The Ascendancy artwork was great but we weren’t really happy with the videos and the pictures. Certain things got better, especially on Shogun. We kinda found ourselves on the video side of things when we found the right director. This time we were like ‘there’s no way we’re gonna do another record and it not gonna be exactly how we want it from start to finish’; we wanted this record to define us so we put a lot of time into that and found the right people to make it happen.” The overarching point here is that this is the closest Trivium have come to a concept record without actually making one. Paolo admits there was the seed of an idea originally, which turned out to be too constricting. But seeing as elements of the art accompanying the release of In Waves should turn up in live shows in the future, coupled with the music churning away as if the collective bile and fury of the band has manifested in aural form, it finally feels as if Trivium have become themselves. Nothing to prove, nothing to compromise on.
for us it takes all four of us to make a good record. It’s not just one of us that maps it all out and everyone follows along. It takes a lot of work from all of us so he’s also a great drummer who just knows our style he can fit right in and having a good year and a half playing with us before recording is just awesome. It really allowed him the time to gel with us and bring his style into it and just adapt to what we do.” Paolo elaborates further, “It’s just going through all the stuff you do and
really picking through it, what’s on message, what’s not; lyrically, musically, visually – especially visually. Now we’re really focused on that more than ever. We wanted to make sure we solidified that in advance way before the music was done so it took people overseeing aspects more than other people and really taking charge. It really was a group effort and it
took...still now there’s a lot of stuff going into the preparation of the release. It takes everyone... we’re all doing press, it’s a lot to put on one persons shoulders and the strength of Trivium is that it is a group, that it is four collective people that make our
“That’s the ironic thing, With the lyrics we really wanted to be ambiguous
with not telling people the meaning behind things. There’s a lot of things we went through in the last couple of years that went into the music, but we didn’t want to say this album is all about this situation that we went through. We wanted people to take what we did and apply it to themselves. They may get a different story from the lyrics and the vibe of the music and that’s the cool thing. If you don’t tell someone precisely what it is, it can be anything. That’s the way we approached it. It’s not a set meaning behind every song, even though in our minds, we’d each have a different idea of what the song is about. Amongst ourselves we haven’t even talked about ‘oh this is what this song’s about’ we just wanted to leave it open ended for people to interpret themselves.” With the admission of all the unhappiness, despite being on a real upswing constantly since A Gunshot To The Head Of Trepidation and Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr in 2004, none of the mystery or ambiguity is truly removed. There’s oceans of emotions flowing through some of the music here and, if nothing else, Trivium look set to retain that plateau they looked so perilously close to toppling from. And, this time, they’ve done it the way every single one of them really wanted to. “We were never meant to make it this far,” yells Matt on penultimate number Of All These Yesterdays. They’ve just proved themselves wrong. PM
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