MATT HEAFY
Trivium’s unflappable frontman on rebelling, Tiger King and why it’s vital to keep the scene moving
WORDS: MERLIN ALDERSLADE
2020 WAS SET to be a banner year for Trivium. After releasing one of the albums of their career in What The Dead Men Say, they were preparing to tour the world and continue the significant upswing in momentum they’d activated on 2017’s The Sin And The Sentence. COVID-19 may have had other plans, but it hasn’t stopped frontman Matt Heafy from keeping busy, not least of all being metal’s single biggest Twitch superstar. We collated some of his most golden nuggets of wisdom, covering everything from being a walking dartboard for metal haters, to how a certain Avenged Sevenfold singer helped give him a new lease of life to, yes, that Tiger King cover.
I NEVER PLANNED TO BE A SINGER “I didn’t want to be a singer, but Travis [Smith, former drummer] said, ‘No, you’re going to be the singer.’ I was 13, he was 17 and bigger than me so I listened to him! I wanted to be a singer like Bruce Dickinson or Dio or Freddie Mercury, but my voice didn’t work that way - the only thing that worked was screaming.”
LIVESTREAMING IS VITAL DURING LOCKDOWN
“I’ve been streaming intensively for years - five days a week off-tour and seven days a week on tour - but [the coronavirus pandemic] has reaffirmed something even more to me, that people need something to watch and do and hopefully help them disconnect. I like that it’s essentially a way to keep people off the streets, keep entertaining them. We need social connectivity; I don’t want people to feel socially isolated, and I’m delighted to provide people with a place that is their pub, their coffee place, their library, their music venue. It’s all these things in one. It’s making people’s day just a little bit better.”