The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with TRIVIUM bassist Paulo Gregoletto. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

On mixing new and old material in their set:

“It's been great. I mean, it's so hard to judge who has been a fan since the beginning or not. Judging by the crowd solely, it's awesome. There's definitely a lot of heavy stuff on 'The Crusade'. It ends up making even bigger mosh pits on some of the songs like 'To The Rats' and stuff. I mean, it's just straight up thrash in your face and it always goes down well live. It's cool being able to play the new stuff as well as playing the old stuff too. Down here, we've never played anything to most of these people obviously and unless they've seen us elsewhere. It's cool. It's like every song is a new song and that's kind of a cool feeling to be able to play anything down here and know that people haven't seen it live yet.”

On the differences between their last two records:

“It's been kind of … the press, I've seen many great things. I've seen stuff that said they liked 'Ascendancy' more. I guess that's like an opinion anyone could have. It's hard to say what the overall majority is because there's no way to tell that. I think that people are going to have their personal favorites. Hopefully we're going to be a band that puts out many, many albums and every time you put out a new album, I don't think it's going to be people's favourite every time. Take a band like IRON MAIDEN and ask the four of us in the band 'What's your favourite album?' and we're all probably gonna say different things. It doesn't mean we dislike the other albums at all. It's just that's the one we like. Overall the reaction's been great. Judging on how it's selling, it's doing phenomenally around the world and in some places, it's completely outsold 'Ascendancy' by more than half. I guess that's a good thing. We're just going forward and having fun and playing live shows is where it's at, especially for us I think that's our strongest point.”

“Musically, this album was written a lot differently. One being it was written on the road and two, the writing was done different — we didn't have the luxury of sitting down and writing together. Most of it was written separately besides a few things. We didn't really get together until before recording, y'know, arranging — that's when we sat down together and put the finishing touches on things. Everything was written separately and that was a different thing. So, musically that might've added in a little bit more influences or brought out more of a certain influence than before because we're all very, very different people that just happen to like metal music. I guess that'd be one thing. The vocal change I guess for most people is the biggest difference. I mean, on 'Ascendancy', there's definitely singing like that on it, 'Departure', 'Declaration' and different parts of the CD. What really made us kind of go for that as the main singing was one, on the live aspect screaming was kind of killing Matt's voice, and then two, we just grew tired of it. If you're gonna keep screaming verses and then singing choruses, how much can you do that for people? How many times can you do that song for people before it's like, 'This is getting old!' I guess we just wanted to challenge ourselves to try something a little different. I guess this is gonna be the transition CD where people get used to it or not. I think people are into it. Once they get used to that difference, they're into it.”

On whether the band felt pressure to come up with the follow-up to “Ascendancy”:

“I didn't really feel any pressure with that. It's so weird for most people looking at us. It seems like it would've been like that. But when Ascendancy first came out, it didn't take off or anything. After we kept touring, it just started building. Once we got onto Ozzfest and started doing a few more high profile things, that's when things started rolling, and we started writing before or around that time. So I guess there was no pressure. The only pressure I guess we had was when we were recording was just to meet the final deadline just so we wouldn't have to cut any festivals in the summer. Other than that, I don't think anyone felt it. Once we got in, and once we were recording, we knew we could get it done in time.”

Catch Trivium on tour during April – all the dates here.