Trivium are great, water is wet, the Earth is round. Three simple, incontrovertible truths though, just a few short years ago, the first of those was somewhat in question.
Their breakout album Ascendancy did exactly that and they ascended swiftly to metal’s upper echelons. Shogun stands as a towering achievement of modern metal, with grandiose, progressive flourishes and more hooks than a fishing convention. Though after the underwhelming Silence In The Snow, many questioned if Trivium had lost their fire; that is, until The Sin And The Sentence proved doubters wrong and What The Dead Men Say did the same all over again.
So where does that leave tenth album In The Court Of The Dragon? With lofty expectations and a mountain to climb, certainly. Let’s be absolutely clear though – like the artwork the album bears and the dragon of its namesake, this is Trivium once again firing on all cylinders and cementing this as perhaps the finest three album run of their entire career. After ambient opener ‘X’, the album immediately throws down the gauntlet with the raging, bombastic title track. Its Gothenburg-esque riffing coupled with Matt Heafy’s bark make for commanding listening, but it’s the chorus where Trivium really let loose and soar. Underpinning a gigantic hook, Alex Bent’s blastbeats are frenetic, urgent and preposterously good. The band even find room to drop arguably the most metal mosh call of the year in “The stars have died and the heavens go up in flames” before a savage breakdown.
Naturally, they follow this bombastic, maximalist fire and fury with Like A Sword Over Damocles’, which somehow manages to up the ante on its predecessor with a chorus so massive it’s visible from space. Hot on its heels is one of the best ‘radio’ songs they’ve ever written in ‘Feast Of Fire’, a much leaner affair that strips much of the bombast – but not all, as its solo demonstrates – for sheer earworm quality and earworm potential. ‘Shadow Of The Abattoir’ returns once again to the maximalism of the opening salvo, a sprawling seven minute epic packed with tasteful leads and a massive chorus. ‘Fall Into Your Hands’ is a drumming masterclass from Bent wrapped in yet another fantastic song; his fills are never flashy but plenty technical and the chorus will be stuck in your head for days. It’s closer ‘The Phalanx’, though, that is perhaps their crowning moment. Featuring string arrangements from none other than Ihsahn, it stems from a Shogun-era demo, a fact that’s immediately apparent in its progressive majesty. Another seven-plus minute song, its final moments are some of the finest Trivium have ever committed to tape, as the song moves from progressive metal, through to sheer heavy metal bombast.
Much of what Trivium have done with In The Court Of The Dragon is best thought of as a refinement of the journey they’ve taken over the last couple of albums. That in itself, feels like reaching even further back into their career. While there may have been missteps along the way, that adventurous spirit has kept Trivium fans guessing for what comes next and given the band room to experiment, taking the best from everything they’ve done before to meld it together into new forms. A band reaching ten albums is to be celebrated; not many reach such a milestone, and that Trivium have done it in such emphatic fashion, once again raising the bar for themselves and their contemporaries, is nothing short of breathtaking.