Trivium's Matt Heafy Drops Details of New Video Game Venture

Trivium's Matt Heafy has caught the scoring bug and during his recent interview with Full Metal Jackie for her weekend radio show, the singer revealed he's got a new video game venture in the works.

The singer was beaming about his experiences with scoring the music for Deathgasm 2 and creating a score for the True Believers comic earlier this year when he revealed he's now expanded his scope into the video game world.

"My good friend Kendall and I, we're actually making our own video game. It's a four-person team, two designers. Kendall is the creative director/story writer. Myself as the composer," shared Heafy, adding. "We're making like a cyberpunk futuristic side-scroller video game, like Japanese video game and it's gonna be incredible. It's a female warrior heroine story. The music is awesome. It's a mixture of metal and industrial and electronic and traditional Japanese as well."

The game carries the title Kunoichi and Heafy says of its music, "So it's me playing a lot of the traditional Japanese instruments people have been seeing me use, but being able to see the demos of that has been pretty incredible. It's been fun to do all the stuff."

In a wide-reaching chat, Heafy also delved into the new Trivium Struck Dead EP and the physical and mental journey that he underwent as the record came together. He also details the extensive preparation that he undergoes on a daily basis and shares the history of their airport hangar that's now become the studio they've always dreamed of.

Heafy speaks about seeing Trivium's influence and how its impacting a new generation of acts, the band's recent split with drummer Alex Bent and explains why this past year has been his favorite time within the group. Check out more of the chat below.

It's Full Metal Jackie. Super excited to welcome back for the first time in a long time, Matt Heafy of Trivium. Things are obviously starting to pick up in your world again with the Struck Dead EP and this big tour with Jinjer and Heriot. What typically is your life like in those periods between finishing recording and starting the promotional cycle and touring? Are there family moments or things you try to make sure you get in before you leave for an extended period? And are you mentally and physically prepared for what's ahead?

I basically have two ways of living, on-tour living and off-tour living, and I like to keep the consistency the same. I basically never take time off of my singing, screaming, guitar-playing regimen ever. So Monday through Friday, I make sure I at least hit one to four hours a day of singing, screaming, guitar-playing and that's typically while I'm streaming on Twitch and all my social medias.

I get up at about 6:30. The kids are up. I start cleaning up, getting the kids prepped. My wife starts making food for everybody. I'm doing my vocal exercises while I'm doing this. We bike the kids to school, come home, then I start prepping for jujitsu, so I'll go off to jujitsu.

How would I break this schedule out to make even more sense? So three days a week, I go to yoga. I go to yoga class. My wife just became a certified yoga teacher, so I'll go to her classes on Monday, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I have three days a week of strength conditioning, that's Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I'm working with a strength and conditioning coach and nutritionist as well, just to help get my jujitsu better, to be more fit for life.

My goal with the whole thing with life and fitness and everything is longevity so that I'm in shape for my grandkids so I can be playing with them as I play with my kids as their children. And then a lot of self-care.

That's great.

Yes, a then jujitsu generally three to five days a week included into that week as well, then the five days a week of singing and screaming. So I try to treat singing as I would jujitsu. It's like something that's year-round. I'm always practicing it. It's always up to date. It's always ready to go. And then once the tour comes in, we'll start peppering in full band practices. But the guys do the same thing basically with band practice. We all religiously practice individually and then practice tons as a band as well.

Trivium, "Bury Me With My Screams"

That was "Bury Me With My Screams." Let's talk about how this Struck Dead EP came together.

What's very interesting about that song and this EP is it was written as we were preparing for the Ascendancy anniversary. So basically, we were fully in that headspace of we've time traveled back to The Ascendancy record. We're rehearsing for the Ascendancy World Tour, doing all that stuff, getting in the headspace of this and around this time, this was last year.

I talked about this onstage before "Departure Every Day," the song "Departure" is a very dark song. It's a song about thoughts of end of life and all these intense moments and I promise there's a light at the end of the tunnel of this story. So the middle of last year, I essentially had like a mental breakdown/midlife crisis, whatever you may call it. And amidst that, I looked back at Ascendancy and said, "Wow, I'm still feeling these same things that I had back in 2004, 2005. Why is this? How is this?"

So like I talked about longevity physically, I had the goal mentally. I wanted to be a better father, better husband, better bandmate, better friend, better person and be able to live easier. So I started going into treatment with a psychiatrist and a cognitive behavioral therapist while doing all the other positive things that I've always done, the exercise, the jujitsu, the yoga, all these things. And basically, it wasn't enough for me, so I started doing this heavy treatment stuff, and the light at the end of the tunnel was I was able to get out of it.

So "Bury Me With My Screams" is the first song that I wrote during this time. So these three songs were written as the before, the during and the after of this essential nervous breakdown that I had last year.

So I was rebuilding my mind in 2024. In 2025, had a meniscus explosion in jujitsu, a hip tear, an adductor tear from jujitsu, so I was rebuilding the body in 2025. And lo and behold, by the end of 2025, we've obviously had to do a mild lineup change with the band, so now we're fixing the band up and everything is getting bigger and better every single time we have these changes.

With that being said, what is my biggest fear? I don't know because all these things keep coming and I make sure that I can pivot and survive afterwards.

Matt, I realize this EP came at a difficult time for you. You've spoken about dealing with health issues over the past year and getting back to the point to where you can be back onstage again. How much of that journey fueled what we're hearing on the Struck Dead EP?

Massively. Lyrically, it was all about the mental aspect of it, essentially having that that mental collapse in the middle of last year and having to rebuild it. It wasn't a simple thing of us snapping the fingers and talking to a person a couple times a week.

It was a matter of like retraining and rewiring the brain through hard work. And what's amazing is the light the end of the tunnel of all this was that I have come out of it having more fun in everything I've done in my entire life since ever.

Nowadays, playing shows, it's the most fun I have ever had playing shows. I used to always be in my head, thinking about my voice going home and I'd put my voice out, all these things that would just flying around in my head and floating around and the shows wouldn't be something I'd be able to enjoy full on because I'd be so worried about hurting myself, which is a silly thing.

Once I sort of let that go and realized, I was able to let go of that in jujitsu and in life and in my conversations with people, It was so freeing.

The next thing was the meniscus tear. It basically exploded eight days before we were supposed to headline Bloodstock Fest, the sold out blood Bloodstock Fest show. I got surgery on the seventh day before I started PT within two days after the surgery. Flew out, played the show. No one knew I really had a meniscus thing other than me because I said I had it. The leg is back to about 99.5 percent strength.

So any obstacles coming our way, I feel like we are able to address it head on and recalibrate and correct it come out stronger in the end.

Matt, this EP also came about while you were revisiting material from the Ascendancy album for its 20th anniversary, and you've mentioned that also influencing the heaviness of this latest effort. I know each record is its own experience, but are you someone who prefers to start fresh with each record, or are you open to seeing how past experiences can color the present?

Records one through seven are definitely drastically different from each other. They all sounds so different, which I love that we tried that. The last three, Sin in the Sentence, What the Dead Men Say and The Court of the Dragon, are a little more cohesive. They're a little more similar.

But it's expanding upon records one through seven and painting their own sonic landscape. With what we're doing, 'cause typically we keep the records that we're working on, quote, "secret," but this time we're not. So we finished the Struck Dead EP. This was no holds barred. This was everything that was written was set with the guidelines of, "We can only write this music when we're together at the hangar playing together with the four of us." So this is exactly what you hear and being in that headspace of Ascendancy, I feel like it really tapped back into that super aggressive, super technical side.

With record 11, where we're going with that, it's the same thing. We are only writing when we're in a room together. There's no midi demos sent to each other. There's nothing like that. It's purely four dudes in a room playing live. Let's see what happens. Let's see what makes us feel good. Let's make the music that we feel like we haven't heard before. So it's pretty amazing.

It's a simple concept. It's almost like taking your band back to the garage days and I feel like that's usually when the best stuff in life from metal and rock come about, when it is the band together creating this together.

Matt, one great thing from "Bury Me With My Screams" is the unveiling of your studio inside the hangar home base you have. And I know this has been a labor of love that's probably still in progress to some extent, but how was it to get to work out of your own place, and are there still things left to complete within the full hangar space? How are you making it uniquely Trivium?

It's amazing. I forgot what year it was, but there was a point where I started saying to myself, "Man, I hate our practice place. I hate that we're renting this." We were renting this tiny room in this weird music store that actually burned from the inside out once and then they fixed it and we came back and it always smelled like smoke after that.

We said, "We should own something." So I found these amazing converted airplane hangers and I mentioned it to my mother-in-law once. I was like, "Oh, this, we found this great space, but it's kind of overpriced and not quite our thing." And she says to me, "Oh, you know who's selling one of those? Ashy's cousin." So luckily, Ashy's cousin has an incredible construction contracting business and we were able to buy it from them.

They built it for us. We created our own headquarters that we fully owned. And even just having that before putting a studio into it was absolutely amazing. Here's a place we could store all our stuff, put the memorabilia up, have all our gear in one place.

But then, yes, as we expanded, we were able to hire Roger Darcy, who's one of the greatest studio builders on the planet. He helped spec us out something, and he s-spec'd us out this perfect studio where every wall is built ten layers deep. Every material is exactly specifically placed for a studio. He's a mega audiophile and it's the best music has ever sounded in that room before. So to be able to have our own home base where we can make our albums, we can make our music videos, we can livestream from it, take photos. We have this archive of every amp head we could ever want, every guitar we could ever want, every microphone, guitar pickup, guitar pedal. It's everything.

It's something I don't see often, even with bands bigger than us. I don't see these archival library-esque headquarters where you can essentially do your craft the best, like having your own dojo, your own headquarters. It's amazing. I love it. I love it so very much. It's like a perfect easy drive over there.

It's a giant space and everyone we've ever shown it to ... it's like a tangible thing that you can walk inside and see the fruits of all of our labors in one go. It's awesome.

Matt, you are out on the road with Jinjer and Heriot. It feels like yesterday you were the guys on the way up, but now you're the vets with the clout. How much of a hand do you have in picking the bands you're playing with, and what are your thoughts on the up and coming generation of metal bands? Anyone catching your ear that you're excited to see how things progress?

There are so many absolutely incredible bands coming out nowadays. I'm so happy. I've got my own radio show where I can play all of my favorite bands all the time and that's basically my goal. I just play things that I love, bands that are up and coming that I love, and that I wanna help push and progress.

We've always picked our lineups for the tours, but it was around that tour with Trivium, Arch Enemy, While She Sleeps and Fit For an Autopsy that we really nailed it. I'm not saying that we haven't nailed it before, 'cause I mean, shoot, I think back to 2006, it was Slayer and Trivium co-headlining the U.K. with Mastodon and Amon Amarth. what a hell of a lineup.

So it is always something that we think of, "What would a Trivium fan wanna see? Who is a band that we love, that we wanna bring out and support, and that we really wanna see grow into something special?" Fit For an Autopsy being who we've done a lot with, being able to produce the Frozen Souls' last record and talk about that and play that a lot was amazing.

It's been an absolutely incredible thing and to see these up and coming bands. For example, I guess they're up and coming, but they're the biggest fricking rock band on the planet, but III from Sleep Token, his first show ever was a Trivium show at the Hammersmith Ballroom in London and his first metal record was Ascendancy by Trivium. And then we had him come and play with us at Bloodstock. We said, "Hey, what Trivium song do you wanna play?" He's like, "Throes of Perdition." So he picked a song off Shogun that's probably one that most people wouldn't pick or think of. It's amazing.

Even down to the Malevolence guys. the singer was telling me that the first song that he ever played with his band ever was "Pull Harder." And Josh from Malevolence also knowing all this stuff and Austin from As Lions, it's really, really incredible. I always just want people to have our music to be something that they can enjoy.

But if it's ever something that pushes them further and inspires them to wanna start a band and then they form a band making music that I'm a fan of and I find out later on. I think that's one of the greatest gifts I could ever have.

Matt, since we last talked, Trivium have undergone another lineup change. But it sounds like things ended well with Alex Bent wrapping his time behind the kit. Can you speak to Alex's contributions and stabilizing the drum position for the band for a solid stint? And also speak about what it means to have Greyson [Nakrutman] from Sepultura coming in to fill in for the time being?

For sure. It is funny that people kind of look at us as this Spinal Tap band. Like, "Hey, you guys have had so many drummer changes." Although we do not hold the record for the most amount of drummers in a band. I feel like most bands are always cycling out a drummer, potentially.

We've had four drummers in our band. We brought in Alex because we had a great time with the previous guys. But the thing with the previous ones is Trivium's music is pretty wide for its birth of what it can do. Sometimes it's super technical and fast and long and arduous and sometimes it's simpler. And sometimes it requires a simpler approach to something. We'd have guys that could do one end the spectrum, but not the other, and vice versa.

READ MORE: Trivium Part Ways With Drummer Alex Bent — See Statements

Alex came in being able to do everything. And yes, it was an amicable split. We wish nothing but the best to him and for him, and he's done the same for us, which is fantastic. So I look forward to seeing what he does next and we do nothing but root for him.

Yes, Greyson saved the day. He learned the set in two days.

That's amazing.

Yeah, then he came in and absolutely crushed it. The guy is an absolute monster. One of the biggest drummers in the world. You look at his social media following, the incredible audience that he has through all of his absurdly fantastic jazz playing, metal playing, thrash playing. And him coming in and saving Sepultura before that anniversary stuff started, he's just an absolutely wonderful drummer, wonderful guy. We thank Sepultura very much.

I personally made sure I reached out to Andreas and thanked him so much for, "Hey, thanks for letting us use your drummer, man." And he said, "All good and hopefully we can go to those finale Sepultura shows with them." But yeah, so Sepultura will be on tour the same time as Trivium next year.

We're looking at folks. We've had tons of incredible, incredible, phenomenal drummers reaching out to us basically since that announcement. So that's really cool, because before, we've always had to just make a change immediately. Like Matt Madiro who's slaying it with From Ashes to New, we basically told him like 12 hours before his first show, maybe 24 hours first show, like, "Dude, we need you to learn the set." And he did it.

So we've always been under the gun when it comes down to having do a change like that. But with Greyson, it's kind of under the gun, but he's well-equipped.

Matt, one of the cool things over this past year for you was creating a soundtrack score for the True Believers comic. While it's something cool to check off on the "To Do" list, what was your experience with creating a score and is it something you'd like to explore more of in the future?

It was awesome. I actually got that gig from meeting them through scoring Deathgasm 2, so I was actually able to score my first film as well. That was a magnificent experience. That's something I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to get into composing for film.

I'm a huge, huge Hans Zimmer fan, huge Danny Elfman fan, huge John Williams fan, James Newton Howard fan. Ludwig Göransson, I think is one of the greatest composers for all film and TV right now. His Tenet score is as influential to me for scoring as I think Metallica's Black Album was. It's what really set my mind into motion going, "Wow, this is what I wanna do."

Hiroyuki Sawano, who composed all the music for Attack on Titan. This is stuff I really, really love. So yeah, being able to do True Believers, the graphic novel, being able to do Deathgasm 2.

And now my good friend Kendall and I, we're actually making our own video game. It's a four-person team, two designers. Kendall is the creative director/story writer. Myself as the composer. We're making like a cyberpunk futuristic side-scroller video game, like Japanese video game and it's gonna be incredible. It's a female warrior heroine story. The music is awesome. It's a mixture of metal and industrial and electronic and traditional Japanese as well.

So it's me playing a lot of the traditional Japanese instruments people have been seeing me use, but being able to see the demos of that has been pretty incredible. It's been fun to do all the stuff.

I know last year, kind of at the peak of right before that mental crisis of my own that I talked about, people saw me doing everything, absolutely everything — kids book, instructionals, candy, just managing bands, producing bands. I think that was my anxiety. Luckily, I pulled off some really great things. But now that I've reined everything in and tried everything out. Deathgasm 2 is coming out soon. True Believers is the soundtrack. It's out. And now the focus is purely Trivium, Kunoichi, the game we're doing with Kendall and that's it. It's just those two things right now.

Matt, at over two decades into doing this, I'm always impressed that your passion has not seemed to wane one bit. In fact, it seems like your love for the live experience and playing shows is greater than ever. Looking back over the history of Trivium so far, do you have an era or album cycle that you personally enjoyed the most?

Since getting my mind straight and I'll correct myself after this 'cause this is the proof of the cognitive behavioral therapy training. But I am very happy that I have sorted my mental stuff out at 39. I wish I did earlier, but hey, better at 39 than never or much, much later.

So, it was a journey to have to realize I'm the kind of person that needs a little bit more work on my mind than everyone else does. But once getting that sorted, this year has been the most fun I've ever had. And  it's cool too because it's not quite tied to an album cycle and there have been ups and downs on this time alone and on this year.

Never once have I felt the pressure, the strain or the stress and madness as I would have felt before. Before I would have sorted my stuff out. And the mind is like the body. It's like jujitsu. We teach our body to create the muscle memory, correct reflexes and instincts and movements when something is happening to it. You could do the same thing with your mind. Your mind is the thing that controls the rest. So taking care of the mind is better than taking care of the body.

Once I've gotten that sorted, it's really been the most fun I've ever had and it's something that it can be seen from the audience. I've had close friends who've been watching us for 20-plus years saying, "You don't look like your brain is processing up there anymore." Because it really was. I was like, "Okay, here comes this high note. Here comes this. Oh no, did I eat too close to showtime? Did I eat this thing I shouldn't be eating? Did I sleep enough last night for my voice?" And now it's just, I kinda warm up a little bit. Before I used to this very specific scientific warmup that I would watch everything and not talk and all those things. And now I just make sure I'm feeling good and warm up a little bit. Even if the warmup gets kind of broken up or shortened or lengthened or whatever it may be, I just go up and enjoy. Just unplug. And that's never been something.

And I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy it before. It's just that I was too analytical of everything. And it's this year. It's from this year forward. I look forward to seeing the rest of it, despite curveballs of this year. I think we're finally coming up to a tour now, the Trivium Jinjer Heriot Tour, that there's no curveballs right now. This is something I can even enjoy further. So, it's this year. It's right now.

Matt, I saw this and I was curious. I had to ask. Trivium and Three 6 Mafia teaming up. What is that about and how did it come about?

Right. So it's, it's Project Pat — Juicy J and Trivium and it is musical actually. So, we are working on some music together, Trivium, Project Pat and Juicy Jay and it's gonna be amazing. So, not too many details on it yet. I have been working on some of that stuff.

I mentioned for Kunoichi, the tying in of Japanese. So tying of Japanese music with trap/hip hop/rap and a bit of metal and maybe a bit of symphonic stuff. So, that's coming from my end. But then, Pat and Jay taking Trivium music and Trivium things and mutating it and shifting around to something completely new. So, that's gonna be very, very fun.

I'm also right now working with an incredible Australian electronic artist named Will Sparks. He's huge, huge artist. But Shogun and Trivium, those were some of the first things he ever got into. So, we're doing some stuff together that is also absolutely incredible. So, there's just a lot of fun stuff going on. A lot of fun stuff.

Thanks to Trivium's Matt Healy for the interview. The Struck Dead EP is available now. Stay up to date with the band through their website, Facebook, X and Instagram. Find out where you can hear Full Metal Jackie's weekend radio show here.