In two weeks time, we will be at Download Festival 2014. Still the single biggest weekend in the UK rock calendar, once again around about 100,000 rock fans will descend upon Donington Park for three days of music, drinking, debauchery, and casual sexism. To get us in the mood for the first three of those things (let’s hope there’s a lot less of the fourth this year, right guys?), the next two Sunday Slaylists are all about the line-up to this year’s festival.

This week: The big guns. The heavy hitters. The bands you know.

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Dual-headliner tours are always a weird one. No matter what fancy-pants arrangements the bands come to, no matter if they have a stricty-enforced on-off switch for who plays last every night, naturally one band rises above the other. And so it goes with Killswitch Engage and Trivium, who are currently enacting this age-old conflict at venues up and down the length of the UK. Our snapper in the North, Gary Wolstenholme, was on hand in Manchester to shoot both bands when they brought that unspoken conflict to the O2 Academy.

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Reviews, interviews, and the like are our bread and butter – as much as we like our giant, sprawling, controversy-stirring opinion pieces, it’d be knackering if that’s all we did. Today we’re going to look back at our biggest reviews and interviews of 2013 – and by “biggest”, we mean the ones that the most people read. Oh, and reveal what was the most popular entry in our high-brow Heavy Metal Sandwich series. Just because.

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Trivium
Vengeance Falls
Roadrunner Records
14 October 2013

by Raz

Of the big four metal bands of the modern era (Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet For My Valentine, Five Finger Death Punch, and Trivium) it is Trivium who are the most worthy. They don’t have the cheesy emptiness of the Welshmen, they’ve stopped ripping off Metallica quite as blatantly as Avenged Sevenfold are doing now and they’re not political knuckle-draggers like Five Finger Death Punch.

Basically, as fashionable as it is to suggest that none of them are metal enough to be spoken of in the same breath as the likes of Metallica and Pantera, Trivium, by simply being a bunch of metallers playing metal for metallers, have got the least to dislike about them. By a long way.

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A few weeks ago, I got an invite to go to David Draiman’s house in Texas. He was going to provide food from the best barbecue joint in Austin. The catch? I had to listen to the new album from his new project, Device. Mmmm, barbecue. How bad could it be, right? Mmmm, barbecue.

‘Mad’ David Draiman. He’s the singer from Disturbed. He made that weird monkey noise in rock club floor-filler, ‘Stupify’. He’s the guy with those massive lip piercings. He tweets in 100 PER CENT CAPITAL LETTERS on Twitter. He’s right up there with Fred Durst and Coby Dick as a premier larger-than-life nu metal personality – ostensibly macho and totally metal. There’s a lot to make fun of and cynical old me? I’m sceptical about this whole shebang.

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It’s that time of year again – it’s the return of the Thrash Hits Download Festival splash page for 2012! All of our Download coverage from across the entire weekend will be linked to on this here post, so make sure you bookmark it as it’s all you’re going to need. That means individual band coverage in the form of photos and setlists, as well as reviews of each day’s highlights, every scandalous rumour and dirty bit of gossip that we overhear, and every outrageous photo of muddy debauchery that our photographers can get their lenses on.

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We remember back in 2006 when Trivium were third from the top of the bill on the Main Stage. They all had long hair back then. Now only Corey Beaulieu has long hair, and 50% of the rest of the band are bald. World, keep on turning…

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We love a bit of metal so we went down to Brixton Academy to see Trivium headline Metal Hammer’s Defenders of the Faith tour with In Flames, Ghost and Rise To Remain in tow. Insense played as well but they played really, really early and Gary didn’t even manage to take photos of them up in Manchester. There are loads of photos. Go click on them and then go visit Gary’s website because he’s awesome.

Six things we figured out whilst watching all the metal in Brixton:

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A few years ago some funny person on the internet created a hastily-animated interpretation ‘Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr’ by Trivium. It is the LOLs.

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We were just thinking about how awesome it’s going to be to see Trivium live in December so we thought we’d head over to their YouTube channel and watch some videos. After going through literally the first two videos, we settled upon 2005’s ‘A Gunshot to The Head of Trepidation’ from Ascendancy, because it’s awesome.

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