TRIVIUM will release their eleventh studio album, Crown In The Grave, on November 20 via Roadrunner Records. The announcement comes with the title track and a music video, following last month's opening single "Dead Inside Of Me."
The record is the first to feature drummer Alex Rüdinger alongside Matt Heafy (vocals/guitar), Corey Beaulieu (guitar) and Paolo Gregoletto (bass). Rüdinger nearly joined the band back in 2015 before choosing other projects; a decade later he took the seat, and Heafy credits him as a songwriter as well as a drummer.
The title track opens slowly, stacking riff on riff before it breaks into full gallop, with the band's familiar mix of screams and clean vocals and plenty of lead work on top. The video, inspired by Japanese Noh theater, moves the album's post-apocalyptic artwork into a smoke-filled dojo where its characters prepare for a final showdown.
The album's guiding idea came from Akira Kurosawa's Throne Of Blood, the director's feudal-Japan retelling of Macbeth. Gregoletto brought the film to the band, and it led them into Japanese horror and cinema of the '50s through the '70s. According to the bassist, that ghostly atmosphere became a set of guardrails for the music, the lyrics and the artwork. The goal, he says, was to sit between resting on past work and reinventing for its own sake, and to make a record that sounds "both new and like a return."
Crown In The Grave is also the first TRIVIUM album made at The Hangar, the band's own studio in Orlando. Longtime producer Josh Wilbur (KORN, LAMB OF GOD) returned, while Jacob Hansen (VOLBEAT, AMON AMARTH) mixed a TRIVIUM record for the first time. Beaulieu says the band went back to big riffs and big hooks, naming METALLICA's Black Album, MEGADETH's Countdown To Extinction and SOUNDGARDEN's Superunknown as reference points for how much choruses matter.
Heafy describes the period behind the album as a personal reset: he decided to stop chasing perfection on stage and "just sing."
Crown In The Grave tracklist:
- Jorōgumo
- Crown In The Grave
- Dead Inside Of Me
- The Terror
- The Haunting Never Ends
- Lie Of It All
- Blackout The Dawn
- Paradise Of Sinners
- Death Throes
- The Agony
- Devour Your Dreams
- Serpent In The Flame
The album lands in the middle of TRIVIUM's North American headline tour, which runs from November 5 in St. Petersburg, Florida to December 19 in Charlotte, North Carolina, with IN FLAMES, ORBIT CULTURE, FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY and FROZEN SOUL. In spring 2027 TRIVIUM and IN FLAMES take the same package to 26 European arenas.