Trivium frontman Matt Heafy has a longtime dream — one that even predates his aspirations of playing in a band. That dream is to create the soundtrack for a new DOOM game.
“That’s been the dream before even playing the stage,” Heafy told us at Gamescom 2022. “When I played the first DOOM at 8- or 9-years-old, I was like, ‘I wanna make this kind of stuff.’ That’s a dream that’s sat there before Trivium.”
DOOM’s rich history of metal soundtracks extends back to the very first game, when instrumentals based heavily on Metallica, Pantera, Slayer and Alice in Chains classics set the stage for ripping and tearing demons apart. When DOOM finally picked back up in 2016, a legend by the name of Mick Gordon was born. Gordon’s 2016 soundtrack became one of the most epic and influential metal albums of the decade, and his contributions spread into the 2020s with DOOM Eternal.
But what would a Matt Heafy DOOM score sound like? “I would pull into the darkness of black metal and bring that in there, the darkness of classical music but shifting that. What does something like a Mozart piece, something like ‘Lacrimosa,’ but what would that sound like if you took that raw audio and then destroyed it and turned that into something else?”
Heafy also wouldn’t try to out-brutal Mick Gordon on eight and nine-string guitars, but bring it back to six-string heaviness in the vein of Rammstein. “There was a moment when Rammstein kept tuning down to B and then finally Rammstein tuned back up to E and sounded heavier than ever. I think I’d do something as daring as that — write a song on six-string, write it in E standard and try to make it as heavy as the nine-string, drop E stuff.”
Watch our full DOOM interview with Matt Heafy below.
Let’s Make Matt Heafy’s Dream Come True
You can hear Matt Heafy on the soundtrack for the new game Metal: Hellsinger, which comes out Sept. 15. Play the demo for free and pre-order the game here.
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