Trivia / Trivium

• Creative Differences: This is why Travis Smith and Nick Augusto left. Travis either wasn't happy with his role or just didn't care, and it was like pulling teeth to get him to do basically anything in the last year or so before he left. Nick, meanwhile, wasn't getting along with Matt and Paolo well before he left and was not happy with the direction that the band was going in, while his excessive drinking and dodgy and often awful live performances (with his Download 2012 performance commonly being cited as a great example of just how bad he could be live) didn't exactly win him points with his bandmates.
• Creator Backlash: They have all come to dislike The Crusade. Some of it was due to residual bad vibes from the songwriting and recording process (both of which were mired in dysfunction, not to mention the story of how "The Rising" came to be and how it forced "Broken One" off the final tracklist), but most is just due to the fact that they have come to view it as a badly-written, half-baked album that they rushed out the door. They did regularly play several songs off of it for a while (primarily "Anthem (We Are the Fire)" and "Becoming the Dragon"), but with the success of The Sin and the Sentence, they have been happy to abandon the album completely (aside from "And Sadness Will Sear", "Broken One", "Detonation", and "To the Rats" popping up during several livestream events in 2020). Matt would later go on to say that the album was reflective of where they were at musically when they wrote it and wasn't exactly a compromise or an impulsive bid for greater respectability (if anything, it was more in response to how they felt about the heavy music landscape, as they were getting increasingly sick of melodic metalcore and bands that all sounded the same and wanted to make a throwback record as a repudiation of that scene) - it just didn't come out right and was the subject of some really questionable choices.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Though technically not from the band themselves, Matt revealed in a 2020 livestream that he considers his work on Capharnaum's Fractured to be his best harsh vocal performance to date, though he didn't specify the reason why.
• Doing It for the Art: The core of why they made The Crusade. As per Matt, they had already started to notice melodic metalcore bands picking up their most superficial and easy-to-imitate stylistic hallmarks once Ascendancy began to blow up, and they wanted to distance themselves from the crop of imitators and established bands looking for the next big thing to bite on that were sure to follow, so they instead decided to make a record reflective of their biggest influences. The audience that the metalcore elements had attracted also played a role, as they were aware that the emo and scene crowd had taken to the breakdowns and clean choruses, and they feared being pigeonholed as that kind of band and wanted to alienate that crowd before it became a problem.
• Hitless Hit Albums: Every album since Ascendancy has charted on the Billboard Top 40, and Ascendancy itself went Gold. Not one hit single, though "Anthem (We Are the Fire)", "Until the World Goes Cold", and "The Heart From Your Hate" all received heavy airplay.
  • "Until the World Goes Cold" did reach #10 on the Mainstream Rock chart, but it remains their only track that can be remotely classified as a hit, as no other songs have placed above #24 on Mainstream Rock or any other chart.
• The Pete Best: Brad Lewter, Jarred Bonaparte, and Matt Schuler never did anything music-related after leaving. Semi-subverted with Richie Brown, as he has had some minor underground success with Mindscar in the 2010s (they actually pre-dated Trivium by a year, but fizzled out shortly after Brown left Trivium) and has also played shows with Nader Sadek's band and The Absence, in addition to still being friends with Matt Heafy. Brown also joined the revived Terrorizer in 2023.
• Promoted Fanboy
  • While it was a studio project that was done playing shows by the time that Matt Heafy became a part of it, Matt wound up being this for Capharnaum when he tracked vocals for Fractured, as he was a fan of their music well before Jason Suecof invited him in.
  • Matt Heafy is a fan of Spawn, and got the chance to use two of the songs from What the Dead Men Say ("IX" and "Scattering the Ashes") to represent the character in his reveal trailer for Mortal Kombat 11 by Netherrealm Studios themselves.
• Refitted for Sequel: "Silence in the Snow" was originally written for Shogun, but was shelved because it did not fit with the rest of the material. They later brought it back for the eponymous album when they realized that it would be a perfect fit for the material they had written for the album. The same was true for "The Phalanx", which was also written for Shogun and sat in the vault for thirteen years until they finally dusted it off and tweaked it a bit for In the Court of the Dragon.
• Throw It In!: "The Rising" was a last-minute track that wasn't even really supposed to be on The Crusade, and Gregoletto wrote it solely because the band could sense that "Anthem (We Are the Fire)" was going to be a hit and they all wanted to see if they could make lightning strike twice. The result was a song that they hated from the start that also demoted a song that Gregoletto actually wanted to be on the album ("Broken One") to a bonus track, and to add insult to injury, they still refuse to play it live.