TRIVIUM have announced their eleventh studio album, Crown In The Grave, arriving November 20 via Roadrunner Records. The Florida metal veterans have also released the album’s title track alongside a new music video directed by Pavel Trebukhin.
“Crown In The Grave” combines the galloping riffs, melodic leads, heavy percussion, and layered vocals that have long defined TRIVIUM while pointing toward the darker atmosphere surrounding the new record.
The accompanying video draws inspiration from Japanese Noh theater and post-apocalyptic imagery, reflecting a broader Japanese cinematic influence that runs throughout Crown In The Grave.
“Crown In The Grave is our eleventh record, and when you get this far into a career, it’s easy to rest on what you’ve already done — or to reinvent yourself just for the sake of it,” bassist Paolo Gregoletto says. “With this record, we wanted to find the space between those two things: Take everything we’ve learned and everything that makes Trivium what it is, but present it in ways we hadn’t before.”
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, the filmmaker’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in feudal Japan, became one of the central inspirations behind the record.
“We also wanted the record to exist within its own world,” Gregoletto explains. “That began with the title track, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, and led us deeper into Japanese horror and cinema from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. That influence grew into this darker, ghostly atmosphere that became a set of guardrails for the music, lyrics, artwork, and overall identity of the record.”
Crown In The Grave was created at TRIVIUM’s own Orlando headquarters, The Hangar, marking the first time the band crafted an album entirely within its own creative space.
The record also marks the studio debut of drummer Alex Rüdinger as an official member of TRIVIUM. Rüdinger nearly joined the band in 2015 before pursuing other projects, eventually reconnecting with the group a decade later.
“It happened when it was meant to,” vocalist/guitarist Matt Heafy says. “Rüdi didn’t just kill it on the drums; his contributions as a writer made a huge difference.”
TRIVIUM reunited with longtime producer Josh Wilbur for the album, while Jacob Hansen handled mixing.
“We took all of the elements of Trivium, honed in on them, and focused on writing songs with big riffs and big hooks,” guitarist Corey Beaulieu says. “We made the record we’d been dying to make.”
The band also looked toward landmark albums of the 1990s while developing the songwriting approach, citing Metallica’s The Black Album, Megadeth’s Countdown To Extinction, and Soundgarden’s Superunknown as examples of records built around memorable songs and powerful choruses.
Crown In The Grave Track Listing
- “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”
TRIVIUM will support the release with a North American headline tour beginning November 5 in St. Petersburg, Florida. The run features IN FLAMES as special guests alongside ORBIT CULTURE, FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY, and FROZEN SOUL, and concludes December 19 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Crown In The Grave arrives November 20 through Roadrunner Records. Pre-order