Released in the summer of 2013, Hail To The King was not the first album Avenged Sevenfold released after the untimely death of their drummer Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan, late in 2009. But whereas its 2010 predecessor, Nightmare, featured a writing credit for Sullivan on every track, this time the band had to find their way without his input. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that a change of sound would be evident on their sixth album. And what a drastic shift it was. In fact, the group embraced the very influences of a metal subgenre that largely derided the frat-boy metalcore AX7 had become known for.
Listen to ‘Hail To The King’ here.
The recording: “We wanted to make a record that slams sonically”
From the start of the Hail To The King sessions, Avenged Sevenfold figured out exactly what they wanted to do and how they would move forward. They are not a band to repeat themselves and were never ones to shy away from experimenting and challenging their songwriting capabilities, either. As bassist Johnny Christ explained to AMH Network in 2013, “We’re always trying to do something better than the last record; to do something different and evolve as a band. We really wanted to make an eclectic hard rock record that slams sonically.”
So Avenged Sevenfold stripped away their sound and went back to basics. “It’s kind of like bare bones – with a guitar, a vocal and some drums all up in your face. Huge,” Christ said. “We really studied some of the bands that had done it before, their ways and what it takes to sound sonically huge. Listening to stuff like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, we were just listening to see just how they achieve that.” What AX7 found was that they needed to give their music room to do the talking. Christ said, “We noticed that a lot of it was the space. You really have to play with the space in a riff so it can be allowed to breathe. We wanted everyone that when listening to this record to almost zombie-like headbang through it.”
The songs: “It’s an apocalyptic call to arms”
In refocusing their energy, Avenged Sevenfold reinvigorated their hunger to emulate the success of their heroes: Guns N’ Roses, Metallica and Iron Maiden among them. “We spent some time listening to bands like Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Zeppelin,” guitarist Synyster Gates explained to MusicRadar in 2013. “The idea was to have an adventurous album where the songs were driven by big grooves and huge-sounding drums. We wanted to match a classic rhythmic feel with a very modern, progressive philosophy.”
In fact, their heroes’ influence is stamped all through Hail To The King, making for a record that sounds more New Wave Of British Heavy Metal than the metalcore genre over which Avenged once reigned supreme. A church bell strikes, ushering in album opener Shepherd Of Fire, in a nod to metal godfathers Black Sabbath, then proceeds to lift from Megadeth’s Youthanasia playbook. As Gates described to MusicRadar, “We intentionally wrote it as an intro track. The idea was that the arrangement would evoke a sense of imagery with the tribal yet primordial drums. It seemed to resonate from Hell almost. It’s something of an apocalyptic call to arms.
