Hear Trivium frontman Matt Heafy strip back four Ascendancy songs to give them a new acoustic feel.
Because he's apparently not already busy enough working on metal sea shanties and a Mike Shinoda Twitch collab, Trivium's Matt Heafy has shared a brand-new four-track EP of acoustic songs from Ascendancy.
The vocalist and guitarist has reworked Rain, Dying In Your Arms, Suffocating Sight and Departure from the 2005 metal classic, with this release in particular the second of a weekly endeavour that'll see him revisiting material from every Trivium album to date – bar 2020's What The Dead Men Say – in this more mellow way.
Reflecting on the 15th anniversary of Ascendancy last year, Matt told Kerrang! of the album: "When we wrote Ascendancy we had no fans, no supporters. We played locally and sold a couple of shirts to an aunt’s friend or high school buddy, it wasn’t like what we have today. We just made the music we loved based on our vast influences.
Read this: Trivium’s Matt Heafy: I don’t think of life like a musician, I think of it like an athlete
"…Ascendancy was influenced by the classic metal greats, melodic death metal, black metal, metalcore, hardcore… I was into bands like My Chemical Romance and Dashboard Confessional, and mixing those things into everything else going on is what made that Trivium sound. We allowed everything to be there – from the simple and melodic like Dying In Your Arms to brutal and fast like Declaration. But we wanted to make the music we wanted to make.
"Everything we make that feels the most Trivium is the stuff that we make with just the four of us – we get in a room together, I make sure I can play it and sing it, we know it by muscle memory and we rehearse the hell out of it before we record any of it. That’s what we did on Ember To Inferno [2003], Ascendancy [2005], Shogun [2008], In Waves [2011], The Sin And The Sentence [2017] and What The Dead Men Say [2020]. Those were the six where we didn’t let anyone in, it was just the four of us before we allowed a producer in.”
Listen to Matt's Ascendancy acoustic EP below:
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