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With a powerful title like “Desolation Throne,” IN VIRTUE’s new single delves into the protagonist’s internal struggle with power, facing the consequences of past choices and the destructive desire to regain control. Trey Xavier, the band’s vocalist and main songwriter, reveals the creative process behind this track, which blends metalcore influences with epic orchestration, drawing from the sound of bands like Symphony X and Protest the Hero.

By Sandra Pinto

In this interview, Trey shares the vision behind Age of Legends, an album inspired by the myth of Sisyphus, exploring universal themes of power, redemption, and self-overcoming. He also discusses the band’s collaboration and how their evolving sound resulted in a more cohesive and personal work.

“Desolation Throne” is such a powerful title. What inspired this particular track, both lyrically and musically?
At its core, the song is about the human relationship to power. The protagonist wants it, but he knows that he does NOT wield it responsibly or for anyone’s benefit but his own – when he was king, he used his throne to do terrible, terrible things, and now he stares down the long dark path before him if he takes it up again. He’s grappling with his lust for power. Musically, it’s sort of a combination of Symphony X, Protest the Hero, and a little of the metalcore of my youth sprinkled in, plus a healthy amount of orchestration and epic choirs.

The character in the song is described as a Sisyphus figure. Why did you choose this myth as the foundation for the album’s narrative?
The myth of Sisyphus sort of presented itself to me as the perfect metaphor for what I was trying to say, with the added benefit of it being so deeply embedded in the zeitgeist already. A “Sisyphean” task, the idea of an eternal punishment as a bedtime story deterrent to bad behavior, a man supposedly beyond forgiveness – all of these ideas made him a perfect candidate for an unlikely redemption.
The idea of pushing a boulder up a hill over and over again, only to have it roll back down each time to have to start over, resonates with the life of a creative on such a deep level it’s almost comical. On the surface, it’s an expression of frustration – but what I’ve personally discovered is that the real joy of life is in the process, even knowing that in the end it’s all ashes and dust. I think a lot of destructive behavior and abuse of power comes from people who don’t acknowledge this within themselves, and can’t get past their own boulder.

Trey, you’ve mentioned the bridge of “Desolation Throne” is your favorite moment on the album. What makes it so special to you?
It’s the zenith of Sisyphus’ parabola. He’s spent all this time climbing to the top, and then he finally gets there and basically loses his hold on the concept of right and wrong. The rules are all different when you’re on top of the world, and he thought he could do better this time, but the poisonous nature of power gets to him again. Luckily this time he falls before he does any damage to anyone but himself.
The combination of the lyrics and the music just hit for me. When it gets to the line “I lost my grip, and now I’m slippin’”, I really feel exactly what I was trying to express, and I’ve been told by many people who have heard it that they feel the same thing, and to me, that’s huge. I’m extremely proud of that moment, and I love that other people can share the same feeling around it. That’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it?

How would you describe the emotional journey listeners will experience while listening to Age of Legends from start to finish?
It’s a cathartic experience. You’re gonna root for this guy, then hate him, then root for him again, and hopefully, see in yourself the same potential for good and evil, and some new and fundamental reasons to choose good for yourself and others in your locus of control. You should learn to forgive yourself for your mistakes without dismissing the damage it caused and your role in it, and that doing bad things doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t let it. For me, it’s therapy every time. An absolute roller coaster.

In what ways do you think Age of Legends differs from your previous releases — sonically and conceptually?
In pretty much every conceivable way. However, as the primary songwriter behind all of it, there are a lot of musical moves that I utilize a lot, even without realizing it. Delusions of Grandeur was pretty much an experiment, a result of trying to cram all of my influences into everything. It didn’t really have a central theme. Embrace the Horror was all about different apocalypse scenarios – zombies, Waterworld-type flooding with sharks, religious cult takeover, the Earth exploding into pieces. It was still a bit musically all over the place but felt like we had a sound. Age of Legends is where I feel like we’ve finally really achieved a strong musical AND lyrical cohesion, and created a unique, signature sound. It doesn’t feel like a mishmash of influences, it’s a complete thought. And this time, the production is really up to snuff. It feels like it will stand the test of time.

The new single blends gritty cleans with metalcore elements. How do you strike a balance between melody and heaviness in your songwriting?
That actually feels like the easiest part to me. Melody, in my experience, doesn’t make something less heavy, it’s more about the performance and sound design. It’s the reason you see so many metal covers of pop songs – Kpop Demon Hunters has been getting this treatment for the last month, and it’s because if you have a great song, you can arrange it in a lot of different ways and it will work. I just try to write great songs, and heavy is just the sound I know how to make.

You’ve mentioned rejecting fantasy tropes often seen in power metal. How do you bring real-world emotion and philosophy into your music?
Growing up, I was deep into the fantasy rabbit hole with series like “The Wheel of Time”. And I loved escaping into that kind of a world, but as with any great fiction, it’s not really about the dragons. The dragon is never really a dragon, and so even things that fantastical are about real personal stories, when they’re well-written. In my songwriting courses, I talk about a concept I call the “universal personal”. It’s about how we all have a lot of fundamentally similar experiences and lives, even with all our differences. That means that if you write something that is real for you, and truly personal, then you ARE writing something universal, because everyone who hears it is a person, and will relate on some
level. So in writing things that are truly important to you, you will actually be speaking to everyone.
When I write lyrics, I’m almost always working through an idea myself, and it helps me to make better sense of it. On Age of Legends, I was really grappling with feeling badly about myself for not being where I thought I should be in life. I wrote those songs to figure out why that was, and I discovered I wasn’t being forgiving of myself, which was really ludicrous because I hadn’t really done anything wrong. I thought about someone who had done some really horrible things (Sisyphus), and how he was being punished for all eternity, and I realized that I didn’t actually believe that anyone could, in one lifetime, do anything to deserve an actual eternity of punishment. Certainly many aeons perhaps, but if there is no hope of forgiveness ever, then there is no forgiveness for anyone.
I also don’t believe in any kind of divine retribution, an afterlife, or the possibility of eternal torment, which led me to the conclusion that we seek forgiveness from those we have wronged and from the world because without it, we can’t forgive ourselves, and then we come to think of
ourselves as a “bad person”, and then what difference does another wrong make?
So self-forgiveness suddenly becomes a personal issue so important that it could make the whole world a better place for everyone, and that treating ourselves better will cause us to treat others better. Thus my real-world emotional journey becomes philosophy, and I worked all that
out as I was writing the songs for this album.

How did Niklas Sundin’s artwork for the album reflect the themes you explore on Age of Legends?
The artwork depicts Sisyphus escaping his eternal torment of rolling the boulder up the hill, tearing the fabric of reality to release himself back into the real world. You see the boulder rolling back down the hill behind him, abandoning the life he had grown accustomed to.
I actually was a little worried it was too on-the-nose when I was describing to Niklas what I wanted, like it was going to be too obvious. But it really does kind of just sum up the lyrical concept of the album.

The video for “Desolation Throne” feels cinematic. What was the creative process behind its visual concept?
It’s actually a little bit of a microcosm of a big chunk of the storyline – we see him in the cave that’s like that unnecessarily long bathroom hallway at the mall, you know? It’s the long hard road out of hell for him, and they don’t want to let him go. We see the ropes and chains pulling back on him, and every step is an enormous effort. He escapes the cave into daylight – but it’s not enough for him to just live again. He starts his ascent to the top of the mountain, signifying his rise to power again.
People don’t realize how much footage you need to get enough good coverage for even a 3 minute video for it to be really cinematic, and not just 5 dudes wearing black in an abandoned warehouse. It was 3 different video shoots, one for the band performance, one of just me with
the black cyc wall and then the cave/mountain. We could have just done the performance video and called it a day, but it wouldn’t have told a story.
I was originally looking for a long staircase to visualize his ascent, but when I found the cave, it was in the side of a very conveniently sized “mountain” – small enough to climb, but big enough to look big – so we knocked both parts out on one shoot day, as well as the mountaintop guitar solo shot of Rami for the Gunslingers video. We found a guy to shoot the drone footage pretty last minute, and he turned out to be an absolute champion – shot some crazy good drone footy and then stuck around to help out, so shout out to Lennie Westfall.
Because I have such a strong vision for what I want our music videos to be, I’ve edited all 3 of our new ones myself. It’s a lot of work, but I think that a music video is a song’s final form, and it feels like reverse-scoring a song – instead of scoring to picture like a movie, you’re making the movie to fit the score. Wait til you see the next one…

Can you talk a bit about the production of the album — where it was recorded, and who was involved?
I’ve been writing for this since we released the last album in 2012, so parts of some of these songs are 10+ years old, and some of them were written just before we started recording. But we entered 1008 studio in Burbank with our then-drummer and his production partner on January 2nd, 2019 to actually start recording. We got the majority of it tracked before we hit some really rocky ground, both interpersonally and logistically.
As many recordings are done these days, we tracked at various different studios and home studios, with the drums being the main thing we had to actually rent a proper big studio spot for. We did those at Kyle Black’s West Alley Studio in Van Nuys, which is a great place with a killer vibe. The pandemic really put a stopper on the process for a long time. It was far from the only thing that kept us from finishing it, but it was REALLY bad timing. We learned a lot of hard lessons making this album, hopefully ones we’re not going to wind up repeating. In the end, it turned out exactly how I wanted it to, so I have no regrets.

How has each member of the band contributed to the final sound of Age of Legends?
Although I’m doing the bulk of the writing because it’s kinda my thing, I did collaborate with everyone in different ways throughout. Rami’s guitar solos on songs like Gunslingers really elevated them far beyond their original boundaries, I genuinely think that’s one of the best solos ever written. Alex and I spent many long hours dialing in keyboard ideas and sounds throughout the album, and co-wrote The River sitting in my living room with the cheapest MIDI keyboard.
Mazen really spent hard hours dialing in the drum parts to make the songs feel alive, extremely groovy and crushing without being too sterile.  He and I also wrote Karma Loop together. My musical identity is really as a songwriter and a composer, so I felt like I had a lot to prove on
this one, but I was also really humbled by learning to collab better, and so I’m intent on being much more collaborative in the writing with my very talented bandmates moving forward.

You cite bands like Symphony X, Amaranthe, and Soilwork as influences. How do these inspirations show up on the new album?
I think the single we just dropped, Desolation Throne, has the most obvious Symphony X inspiration. I was really trying to channel Russel Allen as best I could in the vocal performance, and whether or not I achieved that, just visualizing it did help bring out the best version of me. Soilwork is kind of just ever-present in my writing. I think they’re one of the most underrated bands ever – they put out endless bangers that are groovy and aggressive as hell, with one of the best vocalists in a generation. I have no idea why they’re not the biggest band in metal. But I think it’s the riffing style and driving drum grooves that really come out in my songs, as well as the way they use keyboards to really enhance the song, without it being so blasting like in a lot of power metal.

How important is it to you that the album can be appreciated both by casual listeners and those who want to dig deeper?
To me it’s VERY important. As I’ve talked about here, this album is deeply personal for me, tells a really involved story and covers a lot of ground. I hope that some people follow the trail all the way down the rabbit hole and get a lot from the journey of Sisyphus. But I also just want to write really catchy bangers that will bring you joy and make you move your body even if you don’t catch ANY of that.

What has been the biggest challenge in bringing Age of Legends to life over such a long development period?
Keeping my motivation when it felt like it was never going to get finished.

Finally, what do you hope fans will take away from Age of Legends — emotionally, philosophically, or musically?
That being kind to yourself will allow you to be kinder to others, because everyone’s got a boulder to push.