Trivium’s Matt Heafy has spoken to NME about the band’s new – and first – EP, ‘Struck Dead’, pivoting plans after their co-headline world tour with Bullet For My Valentine fell apart, standing up for Sleep Token against elitism, video games and more.
The EP – out now via Roadrunner Records – marks their fourth and final collection of songs with drummer Alex Bent, who joined the band in 2017. NME’s chat with Heafy took place before Bent’s seemingly amicable departure – Sepultura‘s Greyson Nekrutman stepped in to fill in on drums for one show.
They’ve since tapped ex-Whitechapel sticksman Alex Rüdinger for their North American headlining tour with Jinjer and Heriot, which kicked off last week. Rüdinger has also been confirmed to join Trivium’s writing and recording sessions for their upcoming 11th album in 2026.
While on the way to the band’s headquarters-cum-studio built in an airplane hangar for a writing session, frontman Heafy revealed to NME that the new three-track collection came “out of necessity” after their co-headlining tour with Bullet For My Valentine fell apart – something they’ve maintained was entirely Bullet’s decision.
Check out NME’s full chat with Trivium’s Matt Heafy below, where he tells us about progress on album 11, pushing back against elitism to crown Sleep Token a metal band, the loss of Ozzy Osbourne, and getting the feeling that he’s in a Christopher Nolan movie.
NME: Hey Matt! How did you land on the idea of releasing an EP rather than singles or wait for a full album?
Matt Heafy: “Initially, we had planned for ‘The Poisoned Ascendancy’ tour with Bullet For My Valentine going from January until December. Obviously that was something we wanted to carry out and that was something we made very clear.
“They decided to veer off and change the plans and to pull off a co-headliner, it takes two to tango. This EP was originally meant to be a full-length. So when everything happened with Bullet, we had to pivot. We had our crew who had been locked in for the whole year and we didn’t want to cancel the tour and leave them jobless. The tour was originally supposed to be leg two of the North American ‘Poisoned Ascendancy’ run. We found out that they basically weren’t going to do it about three to five days before leg one happened – it was an abrupt shock.
“So we came up with this new tour with Jinjer and Heriot. We recalibrated these plans and we’ve turned the songs into an EP out of necessity, which ended up being a good thing because we’re now able to write a whole different set of songs for record 11 and that’s coming along incredibly. It’s actually quite different from the EP.”
Paolo said that you poured a lot of your personal struggles from that time period into the songwriting process…
“Last year, before the ‘Ascendancy’ run, I had a mental breakdown of sorts as we were rehearsing and preparing for the tour. It was this big culmination of things and during this spiral, I was looking at the ‘Ascendancy’ lyrics and going, ‘Man, I’m still feeling these same things from 20 years ago. Why have I not progressed from this? Why have I not learned and grown from this?’
“I started working with a psychiatrist, a behavioural therapist, a licensed mental health councillor. All the stuff that I have done with jiu jitsu, yoga, family, friends, food – it ended up not being enough. So I had to go very hard into what was going on with my brain and rebuild my mind, and right before, during and right after 2024 were these three songs. if someone were to dig into these lyrics, these were written during the height of this downward spiral and mental breaking that is me at 38-years-old.
“Everyone knows me as this really busy guy that does a lot of things but I’ve since found a very healthy, moderate way of doing things. I basically now only focus on Trivium, myself and my family. The only other thing I’m working on right now is this awesome side-scroller, cyberpunk, futuristic Japanese video game that my friend, myself and two designers are making.”
What’s the approach to album 11 like, since you’ve mentioned it’s quite different from the EP?
“With ‘The Crusade’, it was my decision to go, ‘Let’s rebel against everything we’ve ever done’. With ‘Vengeance Falls’, our producer was like: ‘Let’s hone in on this specific area of your sound’. ‘Silence In The Snow’ was us tapping into the influence of our heroes, all of whom performed predominantly in clean singing. Basically every single record besides that, we got in a room and we made whatever felt good.
“I’m not calling out those three albums as a fact that I don’t like them – I love those records – but they’re probably some of my least favourite as a whole. But with the rest, if you look at ‘The Sin And The Sentence’, ‘What The Dead Men Say’ and ‘In The Court Of The Dragon’, we made whatever happened organically. The same thing happened with the ‘Struck Dead’ EP. Paolo set this rule for the band where we only write together in The Hangar as a band. No demos, no laptop demos, no midi demos.”
“When we knew we were releasing ‘Struck Dead’ as an EP, we thought: ‘This caps off a great writing period. If we’re stopping the Ascendancy tour early, what are we going to write for record 11?’ So we got in the room and whatever we wrote with that mentality ended up becoming something very different.
“This time we’ve found that the seven strings are calling back to us. I don’t want to say too early what record 11 is sounding like but it’s still us and it’s still an amalgamation of the best features of records one through 10, and the EP. We’re already booking festivals for May through July, some of the best slots we’ve ever had, so you should be able to hear something from that record by then.”
You often credit films and video games that influence your music. Were there any projects that impacted the new EP?
“This question makes me think of the directors that were so influential to me: Lars Von Trier, Christopher Nolan, Nicolas Winding Refn, David Lynch. It’s almost like we’re in a Nolan movie and went back in time. Kind of like Tenet and I was watching that a lot, but I wouldn’t say it necessarily influenced ‘Struck Dead’.
“With ‘Struck Dead’, it was almost like we took a time machine back 20 years, and we were in the headspace of ‘Ascendancy’ again, except this time we had all the experience that we needed to have to create something that was almost a direct lineage of that album 20 years on.
“That’s sort of the best way to think about it. It makes me think of Tenet, and this anime Steins;Gate. I got to relive where I was as an 18-year-old, depressed and angry at the world and myself, and then coming back as an adult who’s a father and has grown from them.”
During your headlining set at Bloodstock, you championed Sleep Token as a metal band through and through and pushed back against elitism…
“It’s crazy that it’s still a thing in 2025, but it’s definitely not as bad as it used to be. I remember back in the day, I had glass bottles thrown at my head when we were supporting bands – there’d be people waiting outside of our van wanting to fight us because they didn’t like our music. I had some of my favourite bands in the world tell me how much we sucked and called me every word in the book that you could never say to anyone in the face today.
“It’s unfortunately still around, and it’s good that it’s lessened – and for us, I’m so glad I was able to make that speech. The truth of the matter is III’s [of Sleep Token] first metal show ever was a Trivium show, his first metal record was ‘Ascendency’ and so he was someone who grew up with Trivium. For me, metal is an attitude, it’s a lifestyle. I’ve seen where Sleep Token’s come from. I’ve seen the work they’ve had to do and their incredibly meteoric rise to success to become one of the biggest bands in the world right now. They take metal, pop, some darkness and they mix it all into who they are.
“There are moments when I’ll listen to a Hans Zimmer song and go ‘that’s metal’, the Attack On Titan soundtrack to me is metal. Metal is a feeling, it’s a state of mind. Like it or not, Sleep Token have brought more people into the world of metal and opened up people’s eyes to what metal can be.”
You’re touring the US with Heriot – what has drawn you to the band?
“When I first heard Heriot, I was blown away by the ferocity and the aggression. And then to find out Debbie is the front-person, I was like ‘This is so amazing’. My wife loves Heriot. There are people who are more excited to see Heriot than us, and I think that’s so cool. And then to find out that Heriot even liked our band for a minute, then finding out they were influenced by us and they’d seen us back in the day – that’s all we could ever want. That’s the biggest thing in the world; when I find out a band that I’m into likes us or maybe was influenced by us, that’s the biggest compliment in the world.”
You’ve had great success with covers – both on record and clips from the band jamming backstage. Would Trivium ever consider recording a covers album? Who’d be on it?
“We’ve talked about it before. I want to, but I think now that we’ve been posting our Pig Pen jams, we’re able to pull off so many more that way than on a record. You’ve got Trivium covering System Of A Down, Avenged Sevenfold, No Doubt, we can just keep going. A covers record would be super cool though, hypothetically I’d want to show off just how insane our breadth of musical inspiration is. Bands like The Offspring, Blink-182, Emperor, Cannibal Corpse, Death, Sepultura – we can kind of do it all.”
There’s a clip of the band jamming to Kpop Demon Hunters…
“Dude, I love that movie so much. My kids love it. Every day during the last tour, I listened to it maybe five to 10 times. I love that album. I want to cover ‘Your Idol’, and we’re about to do ‘Take Down’ soon, so I don’t know, maybe keep an eye out for that.”
You’ve dabbled in composing music for video games. What can you tell us about the new game you’re working on?
“I’m doing a little bit of development. I’m working with my friend Kendall Davis. He’s worked on Halo and stuff like that so he wrote the story for the game we’re working on, but I would kind of pitch a couple of ideas to him. On the scoring front, for this game alone I’ve written 95 songs across the last three years that we have to streamline to 30. It’s a mix of electronic, industrial, metal, Japanese traditional, weird trap beats and all of these strange elements.
“It’s somewhere between all of my influences like Ludwig Göransson, Hans Zimmer and Hiroyuki Sawano from Attack On Titan. It’s a side-scroller, which is something that’s so nostalgic. Sure, the 100 to 500 hour games are cool, but I want something that I can just play for a bit, put down, carry on with life, then pick it up again with no problem like Castlevania or Mega Man. It’s called Kunoichi and it’s from a four-man studio consisting of myself, Kendall and two insane developers.”
We’ve lost a couple of metal icons recently – like Ozzy Osbourne and Mastodon’s Brent Hinds…
“Thinking about the fact that Ozzy’s not around anymore is totally nuts. Brent is one of those guys who was super cool to us as the years went on, but at Ozzfest in 2005, he rode us hard. He showed us what it meant to be cocky 18-year-olds who thought we were cooler than everyone else. We had a show in Paris a few years after and he came over to my dressing room with an acoustic guitar with him and played for me. It was nuts and our bond was always full of love after that.
“But thinking about the icons we’ve lost like Alexi Laiho, Dio, Chuck Schuldiner, Paul Gray, Joey Jordison… it’s important that we keep bearing the torch. That’s why people take this genre so seriously, I see people that come from this and how it’s given so many of us everything we’ve wanted out of life. Through metal I met my wife, had my two incredible kids, everything with Trivium, found my love for food and jiu jitsu, all of the friends I’ve made. It all came from the genre that I love so we’re going to keep protecting the lineage and keep talking about our heroes and paying tribute to these bands and icons that we love.”
Trivium’s new EP ‘Struck Dead’ is out now via Roadrunner Records. For tickets to their headline North America tour with Jinger and Heriot, click here.
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