Avenged Sevenfold On New Album, ‘Life Is But A Dream’
Avenged Sevenfold frontman M Shadows has spoken to the Guardian about the band’s adventurous new album, Life Is But A Dream.
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Shadows made it clear that the band have no intention of repeating themselves, “I’m so sick of people saying they’re doing something new and then it’s just the same old thing. The music that stands out to me now is very abstract and grabs me by the balls and says, ‘You’ve got to pay attention to me!’ This record does that in so many different spots. If everyone says ‘this is trash!’, I’m just going to have to disagree, you know? We don’t want to be that band that keeps trying to capture their heyday in a bottle.”
The singer went on to reflect on the group’s early days, “We had so much influence from hardcore and punk but also heavy metal, and that was the big boys’ league, right?”, says Shadows. “The hardcore and punk bands we loved were the bands we could go and see at shows. Then there was Metallica and Pantera and Guns N’ Roses, and things happening on a much larger scale. We were big dreamers; we always had grand ambitions to do things differently. But to say there’s a masterplan when you’re 17, that’d be giving us too much credit. We were just dumb kids who put all their eggs in one basket and said: OK, let’s see how this goes.”
Shadows later looked back at the band’s commercial high point, 2013’s Hail To The King, “It was this weird ego thing we had at the time. You’re this big band, but you go into a bar or go to a sports arena and they’re never playing your music. No one really knows who you are. How do you crack the code on that? So we learned all the tricks – and then look what happened. It’s played in every hockey arena and every bar, and it’s No 1. But if you get that kind of success, be careful what you wish for, because then I was thinking, man, is Hail to the King really the best representation of us?”