Trivia / Arkaik

• Creative Differences: The core of why Greg Paulson left. The band's unstable lineups and multiple failed bids to get full-time members for long-vacant spots really started to test his patience, and while he understood Jared's policy of taking members out on tour before giving them the job to see if they were a good fit, he was tired of constantly searching for new guys because the last one was either a one-time emergency fill-in or had to bail after having just joined. Also played very straight with Riley Christensen, as relations between him and the rest of the band steadily decayed over the middle of 2019 and culminated in him quitting via an angry email tirade right before the release of "Supernal Flame".
• Creator Backlash: Jared doesn't dislike Nemethia, per se, but he stated that it was way too technical and dense for its own good and has a bunch of songs that just do not work live.
• Promoted Fanboy: Greg Paulson, Miguel Esparza, Cris Portugal, Nathan Bigelow, Riley Christensen, and Alex Haddad were all longtime fans of the band well before they joined.
• Troubled Production: Two albums in a row:
  • While Nemethia is one of their best-regarded albums, all parties involved will agree that its recording process was a nightmare. It started when Adam Roethlisberger (who had previously joined full-time) had to bail almost as soon as he had joined due to his own increasing success with Vitriol (which he hadn't planned for) creating scheduling conflicts, which forced Greg Paulson to track the bass himself. It got worse when Alex Bent accepted the Trivium offer almost literally right before they went into the studio, which forced them to draft Gabe Seeber as an emergency session member; the fact that Seeber had barely had time to learn the songs meant that they had to rush through sessions and stitch lots of takes together to keep things on schedule. Lastly, Greg's unexpected double duty and day job commitments meant that he didn't have the time to hear his own tracks; he recorded the direct inputs, sent them to the producer, and bolted back home while hoping for the best. While the album turned out well and won them a lot of new fans, its conception was easily the most stressful in the band's history by a huge margin.
  • Work on Labyrinth of Hungry Ghosts started in 2018, as Cris Portugal had started writing material before Alex Haddad and Riley Christensen had even joined, and by all accounts, they were plugging away well into 2019. The trouble started when Riley rapidly began to wear out his welcome and eventually Rage Quit in August of 2019. The real trouble came in the spring of 2020, as the album was completely written at that point and ready to record, but the sessions that they had booked were wiped out by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and by Jared's own admission, the band fell deep into the quarantine blues and were just so burned out by the pandemic that they put the band on the back burner and could barely motivate themselves to care, which wasn't helped by Cris Portugal deciding to quit around the end of the year. The band finally managed to finish recording the album in mid-2021 and had a tour booked for the fall, but the uncertainty surrounding the trajectory of the pandemic forced its cancellation. By the time they finally announced the album in January of 2022, the album had been in the making for close to three years, had experienced a year and a half worth of delays, had multiple writing contributions from a member who came and went in that time, and had been recorded by a skeleton crew due to the turnover.
• What Could Have Been: Lucid Dawn was originally supposed to have an instrumental track, but the track wound up getting cut from the album. Greg Paulson uploaded a guitar playthrough of what was apparently his portion of the song some time before the album was released, but the rest has never surfaced.