Avenged Sevenfold members were interviewed to end-of-year issue of Rock Classic Magazine. Check out the full interview below:
Stranger things: Avenged take metal on a trip.
Earlier this year, powered by existentialism and hallucinogens, Avenged Sevenfold crafted the weirdest album by a major heavy metal band in decades. Frontman M Shadows and his wife, Valary, were having a night out at a local bar when the psychedelic mushrooms began to take hold. A new Avenged Sevenfold album was already in the works, but the singer wasn’t seeking chemically enhanced inspiration at that moment – until the feelings of love and happiness got intense.
“Then we got home,” Shadows recalls, “and we just had this connection, being so sure that we had travelled through space and time to be together in every life that we meet up in – the ultimate love story.”
From that experience, Shadows wrote the lyrics to Cosmic, a sweeping ballad with influences ranging from Elton John to Daft Punk and 808s-era Kanye West, and nothing to remind you of metal. It’s also the longest track on 2023’s mind-expanding Avenged Sevenfold album Life Is But A Dream…, with a romantic vocal that promises: ‘As we chase through the stars beyond forever, I’ll follow you.’
The music is fuelled by wild experimentation, balancing heavy riffs with textures and ideas taken from other genres and dimensions. It is the band’s magnum opus, an album of miniepics and pocket symphonies, absorbing sweeping moments of pop, prog, jazz, gypsy folk, hip-hop, Daft Punk-style robotics, classical melody, the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’, and even some crooning from the Frank Sinatra school. Shadows is excited to watch the fallout.
“I want to make an impact. I want to make bold art,” he says of the album. “I think after people get used to it, it won’t be so crazy. And then it’ll be like: ‘Well, what’s next?’ That’s the journey we’re all on.”
That makes Life Is But A Dream… both a confrontation and an invitation, as the band seek to change the definition of what an Avenged Sevenfold track is supposed to sound like. This time last year, Shadows posted his top five most-played artists on Apple Music, which might have been a clue to his state of mind: The Commodores, Weezer, Kanye West, Queens Of The Stone Age and Billy Joel. And yet just the other day he had Slayer’s Divine Intervention on repeat in the car, happily feeding off its raw power.
“I consider us a metal band,” he says. “We’re definitely influenced by Slayer and Pantera and Metallica and some quirkier things. We’re just trying to put our own twist on it.”
The first public glimpse of the new album was its debut single, the nearly-six-minute Nobody, which mixes ominous guitars with a trap beat and a full orchestra, male harmonies more R&B than metal, and, shortly before an epic guitar solo, a mysterious declaration from Shadows: ‘I’m a god, I’m awake, I’m the one in everything/I’m alive, I’m the dead. I’m a man without a head.’ Initial reactions were mixed – surprised, angry, confused, ecstatic. Some Avenged fans embraced the sound immediately; others didn’t get it at all.
“They’re like: ‘That is fucking shit! These guys forgot how to write a song! Why would you put a solo at the end?’” says Shadows. “We were just laughing. That was more fun to us than someone saying: ‘This is great.’ We always gear towards a little bit of ruffling feathers.”
That song only hints at what the rest of Life Is But A Dream… offers. Working with Joe Barresi, who also produced Avenged’s previous album The Stage, guitarist Synyster Gates calls it “a full U-turn. It’s just like a blast off into outer space”.
Work on Life Is But A Dream… began after Avenged Sevenfold cancelled the final leg of their 2018 tour, due to a viral infection that affected Shadows’s vocal cords. The band returned home to Huntington Beach and started writing new songs. Shadows and Synyster would sit together for hours, hashing out their ideas, usually at the latter’s house. The album took nearly five years to complete.
“It feels like an entire lifetime,” says Gates, whose daughter Monroe was born in the interim. “We needed a break after two decades of doing stuff, but we needed to go to work because there was a creative itch.”
On the new tracks there are riffs as tough and heavy as anything from the band’s past, but the context is completely different. A frantic beat kicks off the crazed We Love You, shifting into the grinding guitar that accompanies Shadows as he chants a wish list of society’s insatiable appetites: ‘More power! More pace! More money! More taste! More sex! More pills! More skin!’ There are moments of stuttering electronics and Beatles melody, closing with guitarist Zacky Vengeance sounding like George Harrison on a 1920s acoustic and a bit of bottleneck to create a warm sound of gypsy jazz, as the band’s chorus of tattooed dudes hums along.
“Me and Gates get [a lot of] joy out of playing crazy jazz chords that we’ve never, ever incorporated in Avenged Sevenfold,” says Vengeance.
Getting the band there was a long, strange trip that included psychedelic experiences for two of them in the form of mindaltering venom – aka 5-MeO-DMT – from the rare Sonoran Desert toad.
“When we went deep into the 5-MeO-DMT stuff, it was before covid,” Shadows explains. “But you don’t just go into that, right?"
The Stage was already starting to deal with these existential things – like: ‘Gimme all the information of what we know about why we’re here.’”
The Stage, released in 2016, was a concept album about artificial intelligence that closed with a 15-minute meditation on the Big Bang, narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
“I want to form my world view based on facts and science, which a lot of times is very nihilistic, then reading philosophy or really great novels about this sort of thing,” says Shadows.
“And then that record dove into the sort of AI element, which we’re dealing with now. And it dove into the Big Bang. This record [Life Is But A Dream…] dove into: ‘Now what do we do with all that information as a human that has emotions, that evolved to this spot where we have our upper brain [wired for reasoning] and lower brain [wired for primitive responses] and they’re battling each other?’”
For the 5-MeO-DMT experimentation, which he hoped would pause that battle, Shadows flew in a shaman, whose skills had previously been employed by engineers at SpaceX and Google. He went through three days of sessions, including one with Gates and another with Valary.
“I don’t promote this,” he’s careful to say. “I don’t want to say that everyone needs that.”
For Shadows, the trips were eye-opening and difficult, resulting in a “pure existential crisis for a year” and loss of ego at one point, but eventually also a feeling of deep connection to the world.
“You come to terms with how important everyone thinks everything is, and how they work themselves up,” he says. “And none of it means anything. You work your fingers to the bones and everyone tells you you’re great your whole life. Then all of a sudden you look back on your life and you go: ‘What the fuck was that?’ Ha ha ha!”
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