TRIVIUM's MATT HEAFY Gives You Video Tour Of Band's Airplane Hangar Studio

Five years ago, Florida-based metallers TRIVIUM used profits generated from a livestreamed concert to purchase a decommissioned airplane hangar. The Orlando facility is now serving as the band’s headquarters for both recording and rehearsing, in addition to being a place where TRIVIUM can store its equipment.

TRIVIUM guitarist/vocalist Matt Heafy recently gave Fishman Music a full tour of the hangar. Check out the report below.

Asked how one goes about buying an airplane hangar, Matt told U.K.’s Rock Sound in a 2020 interview: “Man, that’s a great question. We’ve been renting at a pretty sketchy place. Most bands, I think, are in the kind of position that we are that you rehearse somewhere that you don’t love; it’s kind of crappy; you’re paying rent to someone else. Just thinking to ourselves, we don’t wanna be paying rent — we wanna be investing in ourselves and our future, and we’ve always wanted a headquarters where we could do everything. And we’ve talked about the idea of a place where we can rehearse and also store but eventually make records in. And then when we started seeing how much we love livestreaming, it’s a place that we can stream every single thing from — we can stream our tour rehearsals or do special little sets there that are still free on our channels.

“I contacted our real estate agent, who helped my wife and I get our house way back, who just helped Paolo [Gregoletto, bass] move,” he continued. “Paolo actually lives nine minutes away from me now, which is amazing — he just left Chicago during the pandemic; he got in a car and he was, like, ‘I’m outta here. I’m [moving] by you guys.’ So we contacted her and we were looking at commercial real estate. I saw a bunch of different places.

“I’m not saying now is the time to buy, but I kind of figured now might be an okay time to look,” Matt added. “And we’re very, very smart with our money. We’re not a loaded band by any means. I am not living in a mansion. We have just what we need. We love just having what we need. And the same idea was for the practice thing. So we were, like, ‘Let’s find something that is exactly what we need — exact size, exact shape, somewhere where we can do exactly what we wanna do.’ And so she kind of led me to this one agent where I found a bunch of places, and I talked about the idea of an airplane hangar, ’cause I saw one hangar at a different airport. And I mentioned it to my mother-in-law just in passing, and she was, like, ‘You know who owns one of those?’ [My wife] Ashley‘s uncle. So I contacted Ashley‘s uncle and his son, and I’ve been dealing with his son now. They happen to own multiple of these extra hangars. So it’s buying from my family, which is even better. So we’re setting it up with one of our family members, and the process is kind of going through. We’re very close now. It’s not complete. It’s not the size of a commercial plane — it’s not the IRON MAIDEN-size hangar like that; it’s more modest than that. But it’s good that we’re able to keep it all in the family; we’re actually able to support our family, so TRIVIUM can buy from them. They’re acting as the agents, and we can work from there.”

TRIVIUM and BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE recently launched “The Poisoned Ascendancy” tour during which the two bands are celebrating the 20th anniversary of “Ascendancy” and “The Poison” albums, respectively, by playing them in full.

Produced by Live Nation, the North American leg of “The Poisoned Ascendancy” kicked off on March 30 at PNE Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, making stops across North America in Las Vegas, Chicago, New York and more before wrapping up in Raleigh, North Carolina at Red Hat Amphitheater on May 18.

Released in March of 2005, TRIVIUM crafted a classic in the form of “Ascendancy”. It concluded 2005 as Kerrang!‘s “Album Of The Year,” went gold in the U.K., and has since surpassed global sales of 500,000 copies. Opening the main stage of Download festival that year, the Floridian four piece — barely out of their teens — delivered a set that left all who witnessed it in no doubt that they were looking at future legends, with Kerrang! readers later voting it as the tenth best gig of all time.

TRIVIUM‘s latest album, “In The Court Of The Dragon”, came out in October 2021 via TRIVIUM‘s longtime label Roadrunner Records. The record was produced and mixed by Josh Wilbur and recorded in the fall of 2020 at Full Sail University in Orlando. The album cover is an original oil painting by French artist Mathieu Nozieres.