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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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On its new year-end edition, Metal Hammer spoke to guitarist Synyster Gates about Avenged Sevenfold's eighth album, "Life Is But A Dream…" that combined hip hop, classic rock, EDM, thrash metal, classic soul and more, with some hailing it as a masterwork and others condemning it as career suicide.

It’s been six months since the release of Life is But a Dream… How do you feel about it now?

Synyster Gates: “I’m beyond proud of it. I don’t listen to it as much as I did, but I still listen to it a lot. I’m excited to get into some other songs to take on the road. It’s still fresh, we haven’t toured that much, we still have a few months off before we announce something…”

Did you have any fear before releasing the album?

Synyster Gates: “I say this knowing it’s not everybody’s cup of tea: you have to write what inspires you. I’m a big Beatles fan and a big Pantera fan. You want to touch people with eclectic taste in music. I have very eclectic tastes, and so I knew that if it touched me, it would touch other people. I knew we were on to something special. You know, The White Album by The Beatles is my favourite-ever album, and we tried to take our album to the next level… for us! I’m not saying this is comparable to The Beatles! Ha ha! We just wrote our greatest collection of songs.”

With an album like this, it’s probably too early to know how it’s going to be thought of in the long run, right?

Synyster Gates: “I think with an album like this, time is on its side. I’ve been using this analogy: both of my parents’ favourite band is The Beatles. My mom hates everything post-sgt. Pepper’s, my dad couldn’t care less about the early stuff. They both still respect the fuck out of it, but it’s not for them. So, for my mom, Sgt. Pepper’s was the death of The Beatles, and I think for a lot of people this is the death of Avenged Sevenfold. But for a lot of other people, it’s a birth. The birth of a different band.”

Have there been any comments you felt were way off the mark?

Synyster Gates: “Funnily enough, I thought it could go either way. We’ve actually had really amazing support from the press, so I don’t want to make people think that we feel like we aren’t supported by the press at all. I actually feel it’s good that it just hasn’t been ignored. Even the bad reviews, people have talked about it. People are still interested in us, so that’s all I could ask for, really. The negative comments, I feel they’re the minority. I think people have been really thoughtful in considering this album.”

Has anyone else from other bands reached out to you about the album?

Synyster Gates: “I can’t name-drop, unfortunately, I’m not that guy to use their names, but, yes, overwhelmingly so. The amount of positive criticisms or even the ‘What the fuck?’… that’s my favourite, people calling me up and going, ‘What the fuck did you do? What were you listening to? Where did this come from?’ I love that. We’ve definitely had more of that here than from any other record.” You’ve been touring the States.

How challenging has it been to integrate the new material?

Synyster Gates: “Well, there’s a lot of programming, because the new album is essentially a hip hop album in regard to the tracks and different things. The guitars have to change on a dime. It took six months to program the show, it took six months to create the visuals. We just have to get our setlist in order and see whatever bells and whistles we can add.”

Was it hard to choose the setlist, knowing what to take out and add in, and make it flow cohesively?

Synyster Gates: “Actually, no. We were all on the same page. We wanted to do a lot of new material, we don’t want to be a novelty, legacy act. We see the vision. If the album had flopped and fans had completely hated it then we wouldn’t have buttfucked them. But we can see the passion and I feel like we’re on the same page.”

Which young bands remind you of Avenged?

Synyster Gates: “Kim Dracula, they’re fearless. Their ability to just be themselves and their confidence, it’s mind-blowing. I’m sure you’re going to see a really unique career there. A personal favourite of mine is 100 gecs – Jesus, they’ve just turned music upside down. I was toast after this record – no more new music, maybe I could think about a new song in five years. Then their album came out just before we released our record and I was like, ‘Hey Matt, wanna go write some crazy shit?’ They completely re-energised me. We’re not planning anything new, but it gets you excited.”

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Avenged Sevenfold recorded a virtual concert in Culver City that will be released next year. Read full article HERE.

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Avenged Sevenfold members with "Life Is But A Dream..." Tour team.

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THE BRAND NEW AVENGED SEVENFOLD X SCUF CONTROLLER

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Zacky Vengeance and Decker from Razor 94.7 on backstage of a Interview at Aftershock Festival in Sacramento, California. You can listen to it HERE.

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Living the Dream Foundation and Avenged Sevenfold members taking time to make Vanessa feel special during her Dream Day at Louder Than Life Festival. Check out the full experience HERE.

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Avenged Sevenfold members on backstage of new photoshoot to issue 11 of MARVIN Magazine. Photo credit: Ashley Osbourn

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Total Guitar has included Avenged   Sevenfold’s “City of Evil” as one of the 00′s “Greatest Guitar Albums of All Time” on their new issue (JULY/2022).

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M. Shadows and  Sebastien Borget (Co-Founder & COO of Sandbox Game) on backstage of NFT.NYC event. Photo credit:  @borgetsebastien on Twitter.

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M. Shadows, Synyster Gates and Dan Toomey on backstage of a interview at NFT.NYC event. Photo credit: @dhtoomey on Twitter.

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Zacky Vengeance with his brand new autographed Misfits’ Crimson Ghost guitar case on backstage of the band's performance at Aftershock 2021.

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Avenged Sevenfold members signing Archie's Ice Cream truck at M. Shadows' Birthday celebration last night. Photo credit: Archie’s Ice Cream

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Metal Hammer issue 346 (April/2021) has included "Nightmare” as one of the greatest songs of the century:

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Avenged Sevenfold on photoshoot to Kerrang! Magazine issue 1479 (AUG/2013). Photo credit: Paul Harries.

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Avenged Sevenfold on photoshoot for Kerrang! magazine 1313 issue (MAY/2010). Photo credit: Ashley Maile

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Throwback Thursday: Avenged Sevenfold photoshoot on backstage of their performance at House of Blues in Chicago, IL on November 09, 2005. Photo credit: Shutterstock

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