Matt Heafy Shares Opinion on Metallica’s ‘Load’ Album, Recalls How Slayer Fans Treated Trivium When They Were the Opening Band

The frontman also discusses songs the band will never remove from the setlist.

During an appearance on Mosh Talks, Trivium singer/guitarist Matt Heafy discussed the struggle of creating a setlist after nine full-length studio albums, while also touching on Metallica, opening for Slayer and Iron Maiden, and more.Trivium has a new album out titled “What the Dead Men Say.”When asked, “What is the song that you are most nervous about bumping from the setlist?”, Heafy replied (transcribed by UG):

“I guess we’ve had to do that a lot, ‘Like Light to the Flies’ disappeared a little while, ‘[Pull Harder on the Strings of Your] Martyr’ disappeared for a little while, ‘Gunshot [to the Head of Trepidation]’…

“But we’re kind of rotating with each other. If anyone of my bandmates ever said ‘In Waves’ had to go, I’d say we can’t, like, we can never lose that song. ‘Down From the Sky’ can never not-be in a set.

“It’s more about which ones are becoming more apparent that can never really go. There has to be an ‘Ascendancy’ single, there always has to be a ‘Shogun’ single, there always has to be an ‘In Waves’ single, which is cool.

“Not comparing ourselves to them, we’re not as great as them, but we’re treading into that [Iron] Maiden territory where people are like, ‘I need to hear at least a song from this record because I love this record.’

“That’s a really cool, exciting part. Like, Metallica – and that’s why I like that every record has been so different. I don’t think you and I forget, but I think people as a whole maybe forget, every Metallica record is vastly different than the previous.

“Or if you can grab two random albums from their catalog, put them up against each other… I think ‘Load’ is absolutely incredible, and it’s nothing like ‘Ride the Lightning.’

“‘Ride the Lightning’ is also incredible, and it’s cool that you can see all these records are so different.

“I mean, ‘Kill ‘Em All’ through ‘Load’ – ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’ are of the same world, but then when they did ‘S&M’ and ‘Garage,’ those were so different than those, so I think it’s really fun and exciting when that happens.”

What are the things that you would get jazzed about getting to do shows with those enormous names?

“I feel like it’s easier than it’s used to be. I’m hearing stories about, like, the ’90s, the late ’90s – if you went and opened up for Slayer, your band would get bottled all the time. If you went to open for Metallica or a heavy band, you’d just get trashed.

“Now it’s a lot nicer, now I see a lot of pretty light bands going out supporting Maiden and not getting crushed, so I think we’re the last band on that realm – because we went out with Maiden, I think the first show was Cardiff, Wales that we played in the UK with Maiden.

“And I made sure the first thing I said to the crowd was, ‘It’s good to be home’ because I knew that that was gonna be a hot take, so we started getting bottles thrown at us. I just smiled, laughing, I did something kind of like young cocky Matt Heafy version, but it ended up winning the crowd over.

“So we had been conditioned by that fire, I mean – when we co-headlined the UK with Slayer; it was Trivium and Slayer, Mastodon, Amon Amarth, I mean, that’s one of the sickest bills I’ve ever heard of in my life.

“We went up there in Manchester, I remember, and I said, ‘How y’all doing tonight?’ and I hear 50:50 boos-cheers, so it was like, ‘Okay, everybody that fucking hates Trivium, make some noise right now.’

“Half the crowd booing as loud as they can. And I said, ‘Ha, I even got you to make noise for us.’ And then by the end of the show, we had about 95% of the crowd into us, so we had been conditioned by that fire.

Is there anything that you got coming up that you want to tell everyone about?

“It’s a cool time for us. I remember coming up and saying how it was difficult not having the press and not having other bands into a stir in those rocky years.

“What we found now is that in the world of video games and video-game streaming, all these gaming developers are huge Trivium fans. The people at ‘Overwatch’ – my favorite video game of all time, they’re all Trivium fans.

“The lead character designers are Trivium fans, and people at different video games want to approach us…

“So it’s funny, these interesting crossovers. One of my favorite streams in the world, Shroud, his favorite band is Trivium, and I was able to write his theme song [‘Shroud of Chaos’] that rips of what became ‘What the Dead Men Say.’

“So it’s just all of these random, non-planned-out things that have been organically happening I think that’s the best system of controlled chaos, I guess is what Trivium is. It’s putting all the prep work and all the mechanical practicing of what we do into allowing improvisation to happen.

“Because improvisation is something that shouldn’t be something that’s liked by a person who is planned out and as regimented as I am, but I put all the planning in so when that happens that can become, we could trap that lightning in a bottle.”