I'd wager pretty comfortably that the majority of metal fans out there started their journey with bands that they would now consider mainstream. If somebody tells you their first endeavors in metal occurred by just happening upon a discography of a band like Immolation then that somebody is either a flat-out liar or a unicorn. Like it or not, as is the case with other genres of music, the mainstream is a piece of the puzzle that forms the holistic view of metal. It's normally here where bands are referred to as "gateway" bands. Trivium was such a band for me. 2005's
Ascendancy, the crown-jewel of their discography, showed early high-school me that there were much heavier things to be discovered other than the slew of radio-cuts from Metallica and Slipknot I was primarily caught up in at the time. Over the course of their next five albums, Trivium played a balancing act with Matt Heafy's screaming:clean vocal ratio, effectively experimenting with each extreme of that spectrum and much in-between. With
The Sin and the Sentence, the band has found a sweet spot in their sound by focusing their efforts in the dead middle of that aforementioned spectrum; something that should appease both camps of their fan-base.
