TRIVIUM Guitarist Discusses 'In Waves' In New Interview

Niclas Mller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine conducted an interview with guitarist Corey Beaulieu of Florida metallers TRIVIUM last week in Stockholm. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metalshrine: First of all, the title [of the new TRIVIUM album] "In Waves", what's it all about? Any kind of tsunami thing going on there?

Corey: No. I guess "In Waves" can mean a bunch of different things. Not just necessarily about an actual wave. It can be that things come in waves one after the other. I'm not really sure because Matt [Heafy, guitar/vocals] never he's doing this whole thing where he doesn't want to explain the meaning of what anything means on the record, like the lyrics or the artwork or anything. He wants everyone to be able to get into the record and listen to the record and be able to form their own ideas and what the songs mean to them, instead of having someone else saying, "This is what the song means!" and then not be able to make the song their own, the way it means to them. A lot of the stuff he just kind of wrote a lot and it flowed out and he didn't really have a definite meaning of what it's supposed to actually mean, because it just kind of came out. A lot of stuff was inspired by visual art and movies and stuff and not necessarily inspired by music. It could mean a lot of things and I just think that everything with the record, everyone will hopefully form their own kind of what it means to them and make it more personal to them when they listen to it. I couldn't even really tell you because Matt hasn't even told me what most of the shit means, so I kind of have to do the same thing.

Metalshrine: With the Internet and all these kinds of channels, it's pretty hard keeping an album secret these days. Sooner or later it will get leaked. How do you feel about that? I remember when I grew up, you waited for a record and you didn't know anything about it until it was released on that day. These days there are no secrets anymore.

Corey: Yeah, it's kind of a bummer, because it kind of makes the release date not so special. It's like, "Oh, that's when I can buy it, but it doesn't mean that's when I can get it!" We started working on the record in April last year and we didn't start recording until January and we didn't say shit about anything! We kept our cards close to our chests and didn't say any of the song names, any of the titles and didn't put out anything like studio wise while we were working, like videos that played any kind of music. We kept the mystery of the record and only leaked or put any information out the way we wanted. We didn't let anything leak through someone else. Whatever was put out online so far has been to our own doing and the way we wanted to do it. These days you can't go until the release date without telling anyone anything, so as long as you can do it the way you want to do it, then that's kind of the best way to go about it. A lot of bands are like, "Oh, we're in the studio and just started recording drums and these are all the song titles!" and it's like they don't keep anything a mystery or do anything to make any kind of surprise. With a lot of bands it's like "Oh, here's our new album title!" It's a fucking post on Blabbermouth or "Here's our album cover!" and it's a post on Blabbermouth and it's not really anything exciting about it. You're not making it like a special thing with unveiling information. A lot of people are like "Oh, new song streaming on Blabbermouth!" or on a Facebook page. We made our fans work for it where they had to figure out a fucking HTML fucking code and not just giving it to them, but making them actually figuring it out on their own to get the song and made it more special. Nowadays everything is just handed to people and information is just at a keyboard. If you make somebody put some effort into it, it makes it a little bit more special when they get to hear it and it's not just a freebie. Kind of makes it more exciting and I think with us not saying much throughout the process of recording it and kept as much information secret as possible, it made our fans seem to be a little bit more excited about it and people seem to be generally more stoked. Instead of throwing it all out there and not making it exciting in terms of now and this point in time with how everything works with the Internet, I thought we did a pretty good job holding out on information and I think that also made it a lot more exciting.

Metalshrine: These days and because of the Internet, there's always three or four different versions of an album, like the deluxe version, the Japanese version, the European version and so on and you throw in a DVD of how the album was done. Will there be stuff like that?

Corey: Yeah! We have, when the record first comes out, the standard edition which has 11 songs, but we went all out on our special edition where it has 13 songs. Two bonus tracks and a making of documentary, which we filmed in a totally different way and we also have a live DVD that we recorded and that no one's seen yet. It's not live in front of a crowd. It's kind of like an intimate rehearsal with a warehouse set up and lights and different cameras. We went in there and made like a mini live DVD. We're playing four songs off the new album and four old songs. Shot in like an industrial type of warehouse setting and I actually saw it the other day in full and I was pretty impressed. A lot of people, when they do live DVDs and record it, they go into the studio and re-amp the guitars or fix shit that the fucked up. We didn't touch anything. We had it mixed, so it's about as live as it gets. The guy that mixed it did a phenomenal job and I couldn't believe that nothing was touched, because it just sounds so good and we actually played really, really well. There's some minor screw-ups here and there, but for being nothing touched, it's as live as it gets and it shows you that we can play live and play our instruments. We're confident with how we play and perform. Even if we screw up everyone screws up, but those other bands are just too afraid to show it. It sounds really good and it's got a really good live feeling. A guy from our label watched it and said it was really cool and that it felt like being let in to like an intimate rehearsal type of thing. I think that's a new thing that we try and incorporate instead of the same old "making of". An extra bonus thing because everyone asks us about, "When are you guys gonna do a live DVD?" and we never really got that excited to wanna do one. At this point everybody does one, so we wanted to wait until the time was right and we felt that this was kind of like a way to bridge the gap where they wanna have something they can watch at home, but it's in a different setting and it's not like playing at the "fill in the blank" festival and we also picked the not most obvious tracks. We're not even playing "Pull Harder", which everyone expects, so if you wanna see that you have to wait for the actual DVD and there's no time frame for that.

Read the entire interview from Metalshrine.

Fan-filmed video footage of TRIVIUM performing two brand new songs, "Dusk Dismantled" and "Black", on June 19, 2011 at the Asylum in Birmingham, England can be viewed below.