The Bad Penny (beta)

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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?