“We soaked up all of this great music and that song has bits of all of that – that open-stringed riff that Sepultura, Machine Head and Slipknot were famous for”: How a group of Florida teenagers wrote the anthem that gave mid-2000s metal a shot in the arm

Trivium may have been lazily thrown into the metalcore club by those who didn’t understand them, but make no mistake about it: Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr was the best pure-blooded, no-holds-barred heavy metal song of a whole generation. It made Trivium the hottest metal band on the planet.

Three months after the single was released, the Floridian youngsters got bumped up to the main stage of that year’s Download festival, producing one of the most memorable sets in Donington history. Not bad work for a song written by a band that, at the time, were still teenagers.

“I remember writing that riff when I was still living at my parents’ house when I was about 17 years old,” says Trivs frontman Matt Heafy. “I was sitting with the guitar on my couch. I started strumming that intro riff, and at our band practice the next day I said to Travis [Smith, former Trivium drummer] that I wanted to play him this part. He said, ‘Well, that’s funny. I have this drum part in my head I wanted to show you.’

“And so we agreed to play the parts that we had come up with at the same time the night before to each other there and then, he counts in four, and it just fit. That’s how we came up with the beginning of the song.”

The lyrics, based around a tyrannical ruler wreaking havoc upon his own people, set the agenda for what Trivium would become known for: kickass metal songs steeped in rich storytelling - but that had relevance to the world around us today.

“The lyrics are about a dictator, and it can be applied to anything – the things that happen in your life, or the things that you see around you in society, it can be about present times or ancient times,” says Matt. “It’s not quite first-person perspective, more like a third person that has to suffer at the hands of a dictator. That could be a person, a gang, an army. It’s trying to tackle what I think is the curse of modern mankind – that we allow these people to do these evil things to so many people.”

The song launched Trivium as the faces of the next generation of metal, uniting old-school metalheads and young rock fans across all kinds of different tribes.

“We were the right age to soak up all of this great music – metal, metalcore, emo, punk, melodic death metal,” notes Matt. “And the song has bits of all of that – melodic vocals, metal riffing, that kinda open-stringed Roots-y riff that Sepultura, Machine Head and Slipknot were famous for, which is quite different for us. So it could get kids into so many different styles of music.”

While Pull Harder… is now rightly regarded as an all-time classic, at the time Trivium weren’t even mega-confident it was the obvious choice for a single; in fact, it was actually the second single released from Ascendancy (the first was the similarly ace but not quite as iconic Like Light To The Flies).

Trivium - Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube

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“The record company were telling us that this would be a single, and of course I remember doing that Download show and the crowd singing about 25% of the lyrics without me, but we didn’t know why it was that song that resonated. It didn’t even have the title in the chorus! We thought Dying In Your Arms would be the big smash. But it always got the biggest reaction, and it remained that way until In Waves came out. Only that song gets more of a reaction than Pull Harder…, even today.”

Trivium have, of course, gone on to become one of 21st century metal’s most celebrated bands, and they’ve hit numerous peaks since Pull Harder… first put them on the world stage. Today, they’re bigger and better than ever, but in terms of pure hype, they’ve perhaps never been quite as white-hot as on that epic Ascendancy run. Especially in the UK, where they quickly became adopted hometown heroes. As it happens, there were a shit-ton of killer young UK metal bands in waiting that were paying attention.

“I look at the bands that are coming out of the UK right now, like Architects, Bring Me The Horizon and Bury Tomorrow, that are so amazing, and I think of our relationship with the UK,” Matt says. “To think that we played a part in inspiring those bands is really incredible. The Ascendancy era was a really important time for metal.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 36 (March 2021)