Avenged Sevenfold are gearing up to release their adventurous new album Life Is But A Dream...on June 2nd. Vocalist M Shadows has been doing the rounds, promoting the album's lead single Nobody and has had some rather interesting things to say about both Nobody and Life Is But A Dream....revealing that they were inspired to experiment and make bold sonic choices by a number of unexpected influences. One of those influences was the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT.
Speaking on their own podcast TRAX, Shadows openly states that 5-MeO-DMT was an influence on the record, which is also heavily inspired by existentialism. You can read his comments, as transcribed by Loudwire below.
"Me and [Synyster Gates] were exploring deeply in psychedelics through the last few years. One of those things, in particular, was 5-MeO-DMT. And I had a very tough experience in Type A personality, ego gets completely demolished, you see yourself kind of leave your body... One thing that I came out of that realizing was that life is so short. Don't put anything out unless it's bold."
"Bold was like, don't just play within your genre. Like yeah, there's a huge difference between Waking the Fall and City of Evil, but they were both playing within a genre. Yeah, it was different, but it was all within a... there was a sphere there," the vocalist continued. "And on this record, we didn't want to be a part of any of that, we wanted to just put out art that just... If we saw something or heard a sound, we wanted to figure out how to get that, and not with our normal tools."
Avenged Sevenfold released our first taste of that bold sonic experiment, the single Nobody, two weeks ago, accompanying the release with an mpressive, animated video, directed by Chris Hopewell.
Nobody sees Avenged Sevenfold build on the more progressive leaning sound of 2016's The Stage. The band’s first official music release since, The Stage, Nobody delivers nearly 6 minutes of tension, groove and dynamics. The song twists and turns beyond conventional songwriting and leans in on discomfort before letting go. The beautifully crafted stop-motion music video, which unfolds like a short film, is a stunning and powerful journey exploring the dichotomy between life and death, love and war, and follows the main character through an existential crisis. Stop motion is a handmade labour of love, often taking 90 minutes just to capture only 2 seconds of footage.
Speaking to Finn McKenty's popular podcast The Punk Rock MBA Shadow also compared Life Is But A Dream...to The Beatles legendary record Abbey Road.
As transcribed by Kerrang! "I’ve said it to a few people: the thing I keep getting back is Abbey Road-esque. It’s just different; it’s got a bunch of flavours and colours, we don’t stay too long anywhere, it’s kind of in and out. It’s a different mind-set, completely reworked from what we think of as records and how they should be made. And what I mean by that is The Stage is a sprawling sort of vibe the whole time – it’s got a thing going on. But this one we were like, ‘We want to express ideas quickly, and more concise. And we want to use different ways that we’re using our instruments.’ A lot of people think the record’s full of samples – or even Nobody. But there aren’t any. That’s all stuff that we actually went in there and crafted ourselves.” "I think this record is Beatles-esque in the way that it’s trying to do a bunch of different things, and have a bunch of different flavours. That’s what I’ll say.”
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