TRIVIUM have released "Dead Inside Of Me," the first piece of their forthcoming eleventh studio album and their first new music since 2021's "In The Court Of The Dragon." Further details about the record are promised soon; for now there is the song, and it is a statement of intent.
Built on modern thrash riffing, guitar-forward grooves and the kind of melody the Florida quartet — Matt Heafy (vocals/guitar), Corey Beaulieu (guitar), Paolo Gregoletto (bass) and Alex Rüdinger (drums) — have spent two decades refining, "Dead Inside Of Me" does not skimp on solos either. It is also the first single of the Rüdinger era, the drummer's introduction on record.
Gregoletto traced the song back to the tail end of a long writing day last summer, and to a riff he had been carrying around unused for the better part of six years. "It started with a riff I'd had kicking around for five or six years called 'Slam', looping over a simple groove," he explained. "A lot of the most fun song ideas come from blending two contrasting ideas together. Take a death metal riff and play it like a stadium rock song. Let the screaming and singing weave together until they feel like one voice. Being able to explain the idea that simply as the song was coming together helped keep us laser-focused and on track to see the vision through to the end."
The lyric came from elsewhere entirely. "The song was loosely inspired by the Japanese concept of honne and tatemae — the tension between your true inner feelings and the mask you present to the outside world to hide them," Gregoletto said. Director Pavel Trebukhin took that idea literally in the accompanying video, a descent into the darkest reaches the human psyche can reach.
The song lands weeks before a substantial North American headline run that begins November 5 in St. Petersburg, Florida and ends December 19 in Charlotte, North Carolina, with IN FLAMES, ORBIT CULTURE, FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY and FROZEN SOUL along for the ride. "The lineup is stacked from top to bottom, and we're honored to have special guests IN FLAMES, who not only influenced our early years but continue to prove time and again why they're one of the greatest metal bands of all time," the band said when the tour was announced.
TRIVIUM's 2005 breakthrough "Ascendancy" took Kerrang!'s Album Of The Year, went gold in the U.K., passed 500,000 copies worldwide and later landed in Metal Hammer's top 15 of "The 100 Greatest Metal Albums Of The 21st Century." The run since has included six consecutive Top 25 debuts on the Billboard 200 and a Grammy nomination for "Betrayer" in the Best Metal Performance category.