Trivium’s Matt Heafy names the five up-and-coming metal bands everyone needs to watch in 2026
Matt Heafy is at a transitional point. With his band, Trivium, he’s recently released the EP Struck Dead and is in the process of bringing aboard new drummer Alex Rüdinger while writing album number 11. Things are also changing behind-the-scenes. Revered for years as the busiest man in metal, Heafy is trying to scale things back.
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“[Last year] I was doing 15 to 20 to 30 projects at the same time,” the singer/guitarist says, talking to Guitar.com during a down day on Trivium’s North American tour. “I was producing bands, I was managing bands; I was making all these different products and trying all these different things, like scoring video games and scoring a movie and starting a pop-up restaurant.”
The plates that Heafy was spinning all smashed on the ground when he had a self-described “metal breakdowns/mid-life crisis” in 2024. Burnt out more than he realised, his bandmates and loved ones staged an intervention, and he began to attend counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy.
“What we determined through therapy is that I’m naturally very low on serotonin,” says Heafy, explaining why he had to stay so busy for so long. “I have to be on SSRIs to help my very low serotonin. Once I corrected that, we realised that I’ve got intense ADHD, anxiety and OCD. I wanted to figure out what makes me tick. Why do I think this way? How can I stop going to such an extreme point every single time?”
Image: Mike Dunn
By any other person’s standards, Heafy is still a wildly busy man, balancing Trivium with fatherhood, a regular Twitch presence and his passion for Jiu-Jitsu. However, he’s zeroed in on being a musician and a dad, and the lyrics on the three songs that make up Struck Dead are him interrogating his own thought process.
Opener Bury Me with My Screams is about the spiral that led up to his breakdown, centrepiece Struck Dead (Pain Is Easier to Remember) quotes something that bassist Paolo Gregoletto told him at his intervention, and widescreen finale Six Walls is about trying to break free from mental health struggles.
“I buried myself in my own coffin,” Heafy says, “and the six walls of this wooden coffin are what I pictured. I’m finally trying to break free. It took, like, a year. It was in January [2025] when I started coming to. On the first tour after treatment – after 38, 39 years of living the same way – I was like, ‘Holy shit! I’m having so much fun!’”
Image: Mike Dunn
Musically, Trivium looked backwards while making Struck Dead: the writing coincided with their rehearsals for a co-headline tour with Bullet for My Valentine, where they played 2005 breakthrough Ascendancy in full. However, the EP is just as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic. Bury Me… closes with a torrent of breakdowns heavy enough to murder a newborn elephant, and the intro of Six Walls brings the shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument, into Trivium’s world.
Ascendancy’s lyrics were just as bare as Struck Dead’s, with a 19-year-old Heafy opening up about depression and social anxiety. The album catapulted Trivium into metal’s stratosphere, but it was a mixed blessing. As great as all the magazine covers and blockbuster tours were, the band found themselves being bullied by jealous peers and gatekeeping fans.
“It was rough being bullied by our favourite bands, and by their fans,” Heafy reflects today. “We got bottles thrown at us [while onstage]. People tried to accost us by our van. We were on tour with Lamb of God, Machine Head and Gojira in 2006, and we had our sound guy walk out on us. I was going to our bus and some guy said [sarcastically], ‘Good show,’ and flipped me off and walked off.”
Having been through that and come out the other side, Heafy’s now a staunch advocate for new metal bands, not wanting them to be hazed the way he was. Trivium frequently pick young artists to open for them, and Heafy has a radio show dedicated to spotlighting rising talent. So, for the second half of our interview, we asked him to pick five up-and-coming metal acts who are truly impressing him right now. This is who he thinks will take over in 2026:
Fit for an Autopsy
“It was Corey [Beaulieu, Trivium lead guitarist] who first got me into them. I think he sent me Heads Will Hang first. I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is incredibly heavy!’, because it’s that mixture of stuff that I love. It feels a little bit like they would have been in the Gothenburg sound, a little bit like they’re into hardcore, and a little bit like they’re into modern metal. And then I heard Hydra, and I was like, ‘This is one of the best usages of a breakdown essentially being a song that I’ve heard since a band like Pantera.’
“We brought them out on the Trivium, Arch Enemy, While She Sleeps, Fit for an Autopsy North American tour, and they were just such lovely, wonderful guys. I spent hours or days playing games with Joe Bad [frontman Joseph Badolato] while we both streamed. Love him. I love all the guys: I had them all at my house, basically, when my kids were maybe a year old. We got them all Cuban food.
“They’re so freaking good live. They’re just perfect. The stuff that Joe can do, from his super low screams to his high screams and then his singing range, it’s just marvellous. The songs that Will Putney [guitarist/producer] writes… I think Putney is a wonderful songwriter and a great producer. When you hear a Putney record, you know instantly it’s one of his records. There’s this live energy to it while also being perfect. It sounds so well put together.”
Orbit Culture
“I love them so much. I’d say, if someone hasn’t heard them before, I don’t want to pigeonhole them but they’re for fans of Gojira, Machine Head, Fear Factory – the glory days of each of these bands. It reminds me of melodic death metal in a way, but it’s not. It’s got moments of the 2000s vibe of the Gothenburg sound. The songs are awesome, the production is awesome. But, it’s done very differently. I think it’s really cool that, at times, the drums will really just groove. It’ll give almost a Chaos A.D. kind of simplicity, drum-wise [referring to Sepultura’s influential 1993 groove metal album].
“Vocally, Niklas [Karlsson, vocals/guitars] is a powerhouse. Just like Joe, he’s able to do very low screams to very high screams. He has such a great grit scream. His gritty singing reminds me of [classic Metallica album] Ride the Lightning. It doesn’t sound like James Hetfield, but it makes you think of Hetfield from ’84, ’85, ’86.
“Niklas was one of the people who influenced me to get my grit scream back. The first time we toured with them, I was still doing my safe screaming that I’d done for 10 years [Matt adopted a new screaming technique after blowing out his voice in 2014]. I remember hearing Niklas’ voice and I was like, ‘Goddamn!’ He was definitely one of my inspirations to get that back. The fact that a band that’s relatively new can inspire a band that’s been doing it for 27 years, that’s awesome.”
Burner
“Burner’s album [2023’s It All Returns to Nothing] is that perfect fusing of these different sounds and styles and worlds while being its own thing, which is really cool. It so seamlessly blends things together. I think before, maybe in the 2000s, you could really feel the black and white combination of styles. But, I think the way Burner have done it, it’s their own palette they’ve created. It’s hard to say, ‘Hey, did they get this from Mastodon-era bands? From sludgier bands? From hardcore? From extreme metal?’, but you have all those tonalities within it.
“They have a really amazing recording quality, already. Straight out of the gate, hearing the guitar sound and the vocal sound, you know right away that it is Burner. I think that that’s a really important thing. When you can hear that individualism that quickly, that’s a rare thing, because there are a lot of bands today that are kind of chasing the same sound. There are five bands where I’ll hear five singles and go, ‘This all sounds like the same band.’ When you hear a band like Burner, you know right away that this is their sound.
“If I were to give Burner any advice, it would be the advice I gave to bands when I helped produce their records. I would say, imagine yourself playing at 1pm at Wacken or Summer Breeze or something, to 20,000 or 30,000 people who’ve never heard of you before. What is a guitar riff or a beat or a vocal line or a hook that by 2am, when they’re done watching the headliner, they can still remember you for? What’s your Roots Bloody Roots chorus, your Du Hast chorus? Let’s hear Burner’s version of these.”
Heriot
“Our manager’s just like us: he’ll tell us, ‘Hey, check this band out,’ and we’ll check them out. [When I first heard Heriot] I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is pulverisingly heavy.’ There are these kind of moody vibes in between. When I was dropping my kids off at school, another one of the dads was wearing a Heriot shirt. I was like, ‘Oh, man, we’re touring with them [in North America this autumn]!’ He was more excited about Heriot than us.
“Debbie [Gough, singer/guitarist] is fucking awesome and she looks so badass, too. With that Jackson old-school style guitar that she wears, it reminds me of Andreas [Kisser] from Sepultura. The music hearkens back sometimes to old 90s industrial, which is something that is near and dear to my heart: originally, Trivium was meant to be an industrial band. Sometimes I get vibes of Godflesh when I hear them, or if you stripped back and made heavier Napalm Death.
“I just love the visceral heaviness that goes on. I remember watching them a lot on this tour and people being very just, like, ‘Holy shit! This is so heavy! This is so good!’ They’re wonderful people. Rudy [Alex Rüdinger] actually just gave haircuts to a couple of the band members. I love the vibes of people who are just nice, good people, who can play incredibly heavy music. There’s something extra heavy about that!”
Paledusk
“HUGs is the opening song of Gachiakuta, which is a really wild anime. It’s a show where bad people are sent to this trash pit. I don’t want to give too much else away, but it reminds me of Borderlands and Dune and Fallout all in one. Musically, it starts off with this cool singing pattern that has a really heavy scream underneath. It almost reminds me of the screams that I do. And then it just gets really, really wild, like this kind of a new-school, super heavy, Bring Me the Horizons wildness mixed with Mick Gordon [composer of the recent Doom games]. Imagine the Doom score and Bring Me The Horizon when they’re really going heavy and nutty, using digital chops and stutters inside the song. It makes it seem like the music is glitching.
“The vocalist [Kaito Nagai], sometimes he’ll be singing pretty freaking high, and then he’ll go into this ultra-high, really strange, heavy, kind of Architects-three-or-four-records-ago stuff. Really, really cool, really bizarre. That’s what’s happening in the Japanese scene: it’s really weird. Being half-Japanese, I can say, us Japanese folk are pretty strange. It’s really cool that Paledusk are exemplifying that in a new way, with these no-holds-barred song structures. The hook structures don’t always make sense. They really don’t repeat like you’d expect them to. It’s very cool, very weird.”
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