Moments ago, the ZeniMax team just wrapped up another wonderful stream about The Elder Scrolls Online: Deadlands DLC. And with it, they debuted a wonderful collaboration with Trivium for an ESO music video with their new single. Had you asked me just two weeks ago if I thought that The Elder Scrolls Online would have a collab with a heavy metal band, I would have said, “absolutely not.” However, a couple of weeks ago, I was ignorant and unenlightened. I didn’t associate heavy metal with fantasy settings.
To me, fantasy settings always had a very particular sound. One that was more, well, fantasy-like. I think of the music in Skyrim and even the rest of The Elder Scrolls Online. I think of the epic orchestral pieces that have dominated the fantasy genre. Fantasy always tells epic tales of heroism, and adventure and the soundtracks usually reflect that.
However, I never considered heavy metal to do the same thing. Or, at least, I didn’t. Not until last week when I sat down with Matt Heafy, lead vocalist and guitarist of Trivium. I spoke with him, as well as ZeniMax Online Studios director Matt Firor and audio director Brad Derrick. Together, they showed me how heavy metal can tell tales as epic as the orchestral works I am accustomed to hearing. As Brad Derrick pointed out, heavy metal influences some of those pieces I am used to hearing in The Elder Scrolls Online.
Below are some edited excerpts of the interview:
What inspired this collaboration?
Matt Firor: “There’s a lot of cross-over in the communities between games like ESO and all Elder Scrolls games, and frankly, all Bethesda games, and most iD games as well, where we have huge communities. There’s a huge metal community that most of us listen to and we thought it would be really cool to have a cross-over event where we could take our community and kinda introduce it to the metal community because they are already participating in it.
And the best way to do that was to take someone like Matt, who is heavily involved in both, obviously, in Trivium in the metal side, but also is a well-known gamer and streamer. So, he sits really firmly in both camps and I think is kinda the perfect person to kinda pitch this to everyone. Like how to two can merge together. And he did that through a bard song that he took from ESO and reworked…. I will just say, from my personal perspective, you can see where that bard song takes medieval dark ESO fantasy and starts there so it’s grounded in what we do and then just takes it right off into the metal world. It’s awesome…. It really bridges the two worlds very well so you can see both sides.”
Matt Heafy: “Growing up with video games is the same as metal for me. I got into games way before metal and I’ve always loved that the two genres of video games and music I’ve always gone towards are ones that are very thematic, very full of imagery. Rich imagery. If you look at the cover of ESO, and if you look at the cover of our new record coming out, I almost feel like they could be interchangeable…. The source material for both… have drawn from Tolkein and have drawn from sometimes Lovecraft… and I think that’s what’s always been so fun about it. Why it’s always drawn people who have these vivid imaginations….
The bard song was super fun. It was an amazing piece. As soon as I heard it, it reminded me of, you know, dark Scandanavian folklore. But also baroque music. But also something that Iron Maiden might have as an interlude. It was very easy to paint a new picture of what that song sounded like.”
Metal music has had a bad rap as being demonic and satanic music, especially when it first began. Did you intentionally plan this collab for when you introduced Oblivion and Mehrunes Dagon to ESO?
Matt F.: “Those themes are common across both genres… I think that points more toward the synergy of everything just working correctly…. If you want a giant 50-foot fire demon walking through your city, it really fits in Oblivion, or in this case, ESO‘s version of Oblivion.”
Matt H.: “All that stuff stems from so many great mythologies…. It specifically reminds me Kagu-tsuchi. Kagu-tsuchi is the Japanese god of fire. So, in Shinto religion, there was this giant, monstrous beast that would walk through villages and tear it apart with fire. You also look at Nordic mythology, or Scandanavian mythology, there’s all these amazing stories about these fantastic beats and that’s what has always drawn me to games and game lore. And then I would see that metal would sing about these things. There is no other genre that would make any sense. If pop-country were doing a song about a fire-breathing demon, it wouldn’t make any sense.”
What was the draw to cover the “Reach Witch Chant?”
Matt H.: “I love the time signature changes, I love the dark lyrics, I love the vibe of it. When I started playing through it, I imagined where this could build I imagined where, if we wrote this as a Trivium song, where this could go. Since the source material was so fantastic and so easy to work with and so epic and foreboding, I could picture the scenery that it’s supposed to be in. It was very, very easy to just take the tools that I’m used to creating with… and just expand upon that. It was almost improvisational, the way that I was just able to learn the source first and then just paint a new picture on top.”
When creating the music for ESO, did you ever think that it would get a cover from a metal band?
Brad Derrick: “Not directly. But the tone of the game, in certain aspects, lends itself to that sort of thing…. When [the music] goes dark, I like to go really dark. So that lends itself to [being] one-step removed from metal as it is.
As Matt was saying, the bard song itself almost sounds like the intro to a metal song. That may have been subconsciously kind of how it was written. I never imagined doing a metal version of it as I was writing it. But, that’s where I come from. I’m a huge metalhead and that’s the kind of music I listen and love… and subconsciously have probably spit back out.”
The conversation with these gentlemen was incredibly enlightening. I had not considered the overlapping themes between fantasy settings and metal before the interview. Both rely heavily on telling epic tales. The Elder Scrolls Online and Trivium’s music are both reliant on inspiration from multiple cultures. The mythologies and stories of old are apparent in both works. It is this weaving of new tales from old stories that make their works what they are.
Matt Heafy recommended some good music at the end of our interview and I have since dipped my toe into the metal genre. The decision to have a collaboration between two wonderful groups of storytellers makes more sense now that I understand where they are both coming from. “You are going to be a metal fan,” Matt Heafy promised as he recommended “Twilight of the Thunder Gods” by Amon Amarth. He was most certainly correct.
I would like to thank Matt Heafy, Matt Firor, and Brad Derrick for taking the time to sit down and speak with me. It was a very enlightening experience and I came out of it with some new perspectives. The cover of “Reach Witch Chant” can be found on Matt Heafy’s personal Spotify here.
