Metal Anarchy

During an interview with 96.3 The Blaze, Trivium’s Matt Heafy opened up about suffering a “midlife crisis/mental breakdown” in 2024. Fortunately, he says he is now “in a better place than [he has] ever been in [his] entire life.”

Heafy said the following while discussing the lyrical inspiration for the band’s “Struck Dead” EP:

“Last year, I had a pretty rough year. I think it was kind of like a midlife crisis/mental breakdown, right in the middle of the year. As people were kind of looking around, I was doing so many things — I was scoring video games, scored a movie, I was managing bands, producing bands, [wrote a] kids’ book, instructional, all this stuff. I think I did a chart — it was like 30 to 50 projects I’d finished in a year, a year and a half. I don’t know why. But I think this was kind of leading up to what I was going into, and I realized that through psychiatry, cognitive behavioral therapy, I’m a person with extreme ADHD-OCD anxiety, which a lot of us have. And those triggered down into depression and things like that. So when we were preparing for the ‘Ascendancy’ [20th-anniversary] tour, I was looking back at the ‘Ascendancy’ lyrics, and I was going, ‘Man, I’m still thinking that stuff about myself, about the world around me. How’s that possible 19 years later?’ So I decided to start doing the mental work through psychiatry, CBT therapy, all that stuff, and it was very, very difficult. And I will say that now I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been in my entire life. [I’m] having more fun doing what I’m doing. I feel better, I feel healthier physically, mentally, everything — everything is clear. But what’s right for the [new TRIVIUM] EP, what’s great for the art, was right in the middle of that is when we were doing the ‘Struck Dead’ EP, so all these lyrics were written basically at my mental fritzing lowest point, and I was able to channel all that into the music, thankfully. The music wasn’t even enough. I had to do it through so many different outlets at the same time. And I felt like this is very important for me to talk about on stage. And I’ve been talking about it every single night just to encourage people, if you got this stuff going on…

I think it’s great that musicians have put more of an emphasis on mental health being important, but I think a lot of times they don’t really give the solution of what you’re supposed to do. And so that’s why I wanna tell people, like, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of talk therapy, psychiatry, cognitive behavioral therapy, and with the CBT thing, that’s like rewiring your brain’s habits for something. And the best metaphor I was able to use for an anecdote was, let’s say you get cut off in traffic. [You give them the] middle finger, [you’re] screaming at them, [you] chase after them a little bit. That’s how I used to be. And so that becomes the default reaction that you have. Same thing with jiu-jitsu. We’re taught — the very first thing — how to fall correctly. No one knows how to fall correctly just out of the gate. But jiu-jitsu rewires your body so you know how to muscle-memory fall correctly every single time you fall. So CBT helps you… Okay, so I just got cut off. Now I’m, like, ‘Okay, maybe they’re in a rush. Maybe they’re going to the hospital. Maybe they had to do something. Maybe they were late for work.’ Instead of getting pissed off and then being, like, ‘I’m gonna fight this guy.’ So it helps it in that way. So that’s just kind of a little microscopic nuance of what I was going into. But I will say that it was amazing people to make all these songs and put all that stuff in there.”

[via Blabbermouth]