Trivium: Ranking All 9 Albums From Worst To Best

5. What The Dead Men Say

After so many years of “What is Trivium’s sound?”, “They’re so inconsistent!”, it feels like Heafy and co. turned around and realised that variety itself is Trivium.

They can have huge catchy choruses in the same breath as a crushing breakdown. Ludicrously hard sweep-picking solos alongside softly spoken passages and cheesy chant-a-longs the next.

They can be Trivium, no one else, and it’s MORE than okay.

What The Dead Men Say, then – besides literally being ghosts of the past speaking posthumous confidence to all those other album experiments – is the culmination of everything the band has done.

With Sin & the Sentence showing us what drummer Alex Bent could do after signing with the band, here he’s completely let loose. Almost every track features leg-straining double bass for minutes on end, and the songs themselves match Matt Heafy’s expanded vocal talents with an entire guitar academy’s worth of riffage.

The Defiant is easily Matt’s crowning achievement as a vocalist, whilst the opening three-hit combo of WtDMS, Catastrophist and Amongst the Shadows and Stones practically takes your head off.

As an album I don’t think it’s their absolute best, but the confidence exuding from every pore is reassuring and great to see.