After second album Waking the Fallen was a massive underground hit, they moved to Warner Bros and expanded their sound in numerous directions for 2005’s widely praised City of Evil – though a reputation for rock’n’roll excess, and being obnoxious and belligerent, proved polarising.Īvenged Sevenfold in 2016. How it went was that the band’s blend of determination and cockiness made them extremely successful. We were just dumb kids who put all their eggs in one basket and said: OK, let’s see how this goes.” But to say there’s a masterplan when you’re 17, that’d be giving us too much credit. We were big dreamers we always had grand ambitions to do things differently. Then there was Metallica and Pantera and Guns N’ Roses, and things happening on a much larger scale. “The hardcore and punk bands we loved were the bands we could go and see at shows. “We had so much influence from hardcore and punk but also heavy metal, and that was the big boys’ league, right?”, says Shadows. From their Misfits-influenced image to the music itself – an inspired blend of metal, punk and gothic pomp – they already looked and sounded like rock stars when they released their debut album Sounding the Seventh Trumpet in 2001. That willingness to thread styles through each other was there from the beginning in Huntington Beach, California, in 1999, where they emerged from a flourishing local hardcore scene. Then one day, I realised: this is freedom! There is no meaning. I’d just walk the streets and contemplate suicide. I couldn’t do anything, I was so locked in. I couldn’t go out anywhere, go to the gym, eat meat or drink alcohol. “It was the worst thing in my life but I’m so grateful for it now. “Along the way, I read some books by Albert Camus, things like The Stranger, and that introduced me to ideas like absurdism and meaninglessness, which led me into deep psychedelic exploration with 5-MeO-DMT and doing that with a shaman, going deep into it.”Īfter experimenting with the famously intense hallucinogen, his existential crisis massively deepened for six months. “I was trying to solidify my worldview,” he says. A round 2016, after releasing five back-to-back platinum albums, two of which were US No 1 hits, Avenged Sevenfold’s frontman M Shadows was having the kind of mild existential crisis where you ponder your place in the universe.
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