On Tyranny: Have Trivium Abandoned Their Support for Social Justice?
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Trivium, one of the hardest-working metal bands that also boasts an ever-reliably broad appeal, are close to clocking their 100th date in another year of rigorous touring. Their 2025 regiment has focused heavily on celebrating/resurrecting interest in their second full-length, Ascendency, a formidable effort – some might call it the Florida band’s breakthrough release – ostensibly because it came out 20 years ago.
But as Matt Heafy and company look back on that release – currently playing four selections from it in their current 14-song set, as The Bad Penny witnessed last month in Garden City, Idaho – we can’t help be reminded what short shrift Trivium continues to give 2006’s The Crusade, the successor to Ascendency. More specifically, we’re confused as to why the band continues to bury the record’s strongest tracks, which still constitute some of the best material Trivium have crafted in an admittedly cramped catalog with loads of compositions adored by fans of the band, thrash and metalcore, and even critics.
Chief among those neglected songs are The Crusade‘s opening track “Ignition”; first album single “Detonation”; and the most politically charged number in Trivium’s career, “Contempt Breeds Contamination.” Since Trump became president for the first time in 2016, the metal band has played all three songs two times in concert. Not apiece – combined.
The Bad Penny has knocked guitar maestro Heafy in the past for his sometimes substandard lyrics. But the ones he wrote for those aforementioned songs stand among his best-written, not to mention his most admirable. So why don’t we hear them – or, more importantly, the sentiments he expressed in those compositions – more often?
Take his lyrics for the irrefutably catchy “Ignition,” for example, a song that Trivium hasn’t played live since 2012, when the Mideast wars it clearly references were still in progress:
Raise the guns at every self-made suspicion
Build the bombs
Corrupt policy’s decision
That’s the sound
Of integrity breaking its back
In a country founded as a thievery act
…
Times are dark
With our children spoon-fed ignorance
Inheritance of an anxious trigger finger
Our leaders preach if we disagree
We’re the traitors of society
Homophobia
Racism, sexism
Our systems breed supremacy
Ignition (ignition), inception
Burning is a fuse to destruction
Break the walls of ignorance
To disarm the world for its last chance
Time again for a war
On an enemy that isn’t real
Greedy selfish warlords
Feed the agenda, death’s the meal
That’s the sound
Impending fear crawling up your spine
In a country where nothing is truly made clear
For size, check out what he sings in the equally commendable antiwar paean “Detonation,” which Trivium played seven times in 2016 and twice in 2020:
That’s the sound of humanity melting away
Say goodbye it’s the end of days
Fire rains down on the American dream
Watch all you love seethe and scream
Each will dig their own graves
And bury themselves in life’s failures
It’s our bombs we’ve masterminded lighting the skies
Hideous misfires, many die
Those who survive soon will suffocate
By the poisons we create
Each will dig their own graves
And bury themselves in life’s failures
Detonation
When civilization crumbles man will turn
On one another killing true
The darkest of times will then come to be
Through our selfish killer instincts
And now the ground we called our home
Is but a barren wasteland
The only sound drowning your cries
Is the detonation
It seems we’re running out of time
All good as dead just stand in line
Last but not least, let’s look back at what Heafy spoke in “Contempt Breeds Contamination,” a Trivium song that clearly criticized the police killing of unarmed Bronx resident Amadou Diallo in February 1999. (Bruce Springsteen put a spotlight on the same incident in “American Skin [41 Shots],” the lyrics of which are strikingly similar to Heafy’s in “Contempt”):
Mistaken identity
You really got this one wrong
Racially singled out
He must have a gun
And yet you get off with no time
How can this be the answer
No crime yet they shot away
He now lies dead, the blood is on your hands
Hands which were supposed to protect
People like the man you blew away
This isn’t justice, this is corruption
The four protectors fired forty one shots
Hitting him nineteen times
Searching the body there were no weapons found
He lies with all who died in vain
Murder must be still be a crime
When our inherent freedom
Is hatefully gunned down
By who we entrust
Contempt breeds contamination
One can’t help but wonder if Trivium have distanced themselves from reviving these songs in concert for fear of dividing their fanbase or being deemed too “political” – even though it appears that the metal community, rather shockingly, is doing a far more formidable job standing up to Authoritarian America than punks. Or perhaps he and/or other members of the band have had a change of heart about their clear support for human rights in the past?
The Bad Penny welcomes a dialogue with Trivium on this topic, given their past (and perhaps present) support for social justice and opposition to the terror tactics currently employed by ICE and CBP, the Trump administration’s efforts to quell and criminalize dissent, and the federal government’s shameless and ever-sickening embrace of violence as a tool intended to invoke fear and consolidate power instead of actually make the country safer.
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