M. Shadows recently joined a Q&A session with Indonesia’s Medcom.id. He explained whether metal music should use sounds and styles from other genres to create new forms:
“Oh, I don’t know. I think metal music—I don’t really worry about that. I think people should just play whatever they want, and if you wanna be inspired or if you’re hearing things from other genres that you like and you wanna incorporate it, you should. But if you also wanna play a back-to-basics sort of AC/DC album, then you should do that.”
The Avenged Sevenfold vocalist noted:
“I just think there’s not many genres—A lot of genres have rules, and I think metal should be like the anti-everything, and it should have no rules, and you should be able to do whatever you want.”
He gave some of today’s metal bands as examples and went on:
“I think there’s a bunch of artists coming up right now. Kim Dracula, Bring Me The Horizon, Bad Omens, Sleep Token… There’s a bunch of bands that are incorporating all sorts of stuff. So, I think there should just be no rules. Just do whatever you want.”
His Band Went Experimental For Latest Music
Avenged Sevenfold released their newest album, ‘Life Is But A Dream…,’ last year. The album reached number 13 on the Billboard 200 chart in its first week.
The group worked with Joe Barresi for four years to write and record the new songs. M. Shadows talked about their new sound in a chat with HardDrive Radio:
“We were just looking for really bold moments—in life, in art, in film. Things that we could sort of wrap our minds around an audio representation of how we were feeling about certain things. At this point, playing around with melody, playing around with tones, playing around with left turns, curveballs was really appealing to us.”
He added:
“I think we’ve proven to everyone, whether they like the band or not, that we kind of know the rules of music, and this record, we were able to just go break all the rules.”
Avenged Sevenfold Is On The Road
A new leg of the supporting tour for the 2023 album kicked off at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York on March 6. The tour included first-time performances in Manchester, New Hampshire; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Newark.
Avenged Sevenfold also played in Des Moines, Iowa for the first time in 18 years and took the stage in Cleveland, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the first time in 15 years.
The band performed their first concert since June 2018 at AREA51 in Las Vegas on May 12, 2023.