Trivium’s Matt Heafy Unveils Four-Track The Crusade Acoustic EP

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Following last week’s acoustic Ascendancy EP from Matt Heafy, the Trivium frontman has now shared his next set of stripped back songs from the band’s follow-up album, ‘The Crusade’.

The week saw the vocalist/guitarist rework ‘Entrance of the Conflagration’, ‘Anthem (We are the Fire)’, ‘Becoming the Dragon’, and ‘This World Can’t Tear Us Apart’ from Trivium’s 2006 metal classic.

Speaking with Kerrang! last year, Matt revealed that ‘The Crusade’ “was my decision to rebel against everything we just did. I looked at Ascendancy and thought we did everything right. Can we do everything right again? I don’t know. And I looked around and thought everyone is doing screaming and singing, everyone is doing breakdowns and solos, and everyone has a ton of double-bass – so let’s do the opposite. Let’s make a record that sounds like it’s from the ​‘80s, that’s really thrash, I’m gonna sing entirely, no breakdowns, go back to standard tuning.”

“I’ve thought about what would happen if we made Ascendancy Part 2 instead, and the UK and the U.S. would have been happy, but I don’t know if the rest of the world would have picked up the way that it did. I know we wouldn’t be exactly where we are now, and where we are now is a place where we’re able to try something different on every single record until recently. While Sin and Dead Men aren’t drastic differences from each other, it’s that same idea of allowing everything to happen. I don’t think we’d have made a record like Shogun, Sin or Dead Men if we didn’t do The Crusade. And at the time of The Crusade, the screaming was starting to feel pretty terrible; I should have learned to scream like I can now and it not hurt. It felt like my throat was bleeding every show.”

“Everything you do in life leads to where you’re at now and you need every failure and every success, but Ascendancy was such an interesting point. It was the first and only time in our career where Trivium were winning awards, getting magazine covers, features – we were a band that the press would talk about. That was the only time in our career that it happened and the only place it really happened was the UK, which is why we love it so much. But it’s been an interesting relationship in that transition from Ascendancy to The Crusade, that transition from, ​‘You will be the next biggest band in the world’ to, ​‘You are the worst band in the world.’ That was an important life lesson for a 19-year-old to learn.”

Check out the new acoustic The Crusade EP here:

And here’s last week’s Ascendancy acoustic EP: