"When we started writing this record, I was working on writing all sorts of guitar riffs and dueling guitars and sending 'em to Syn," says guitarist Zacky Vengeance. This is actually the most guitar-centric record we've ever done - everything other than the orchestral stuff, even the synth stuff, is guitars." Those days are done for us, but it doesn't mean it can't be guitar-centric. "Nobody in the band wanted to plug into an amplifier, turn it way up and write regurgitated Avenged riffs, regurgitated Pantera riffs, regurgitated Metallica riffs. "It was just time for us to explore new territories, new approaches and new techniques," Gates continues. Indeed, Avenged were already gearing up to take their music to uncharted realms well before the pandemic upended everyone's lives. Having all this time was essential to making this project happen." "Time was of the essence," says Gates, "but not in the sense that we needed to do some-thing quickly or expeditiously. But while the band was occasionally frustrated by slowdowns in the recording and mixing process (and by studio protocols that often kept them from being able to have as many people at the recording sessions as they'd have liked), the prevailing sentiment throughout the band is that an album this richly flavored required extra time in the oven. "Because all my favorite records were shocking at first, like, 'OK, this makes me feel uncomfortable, but why?'"Ĭountless albums released over the past few years have been delayed and shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Life Is but a Dream… is no exception. "I think the biggest compliment so far is people just not understanding it, and then by the tenth time they've heard it they're like, 'Wait - I think I like this!'" chuckles Brooks Wackerman, who joined Avenged Sevenfold in 2015 after drumming for nearly 15 years with L.A. "It's about, Does it make you misty-eyed? Does it jar you in the best way? And the answer to that question on this record is, Yes - yes, it does." It's not just, 'Oh, that's catchy,'" he laughs. These are melodies that give me goosebumps, chord changes that give me goosebumps, arrangements that give me goosebumps. "This is music that I don't think I've ever heard before. "We love this record unapologetically," says Gates. Life Is but a Dream… is the kind of record that may take a dozen or more spins before everything sinks in, and Avenged Sevenfold are completely cool with that. Their new 11-song opus, co-produced with Joe Barresi, is a truly wild ride where Pantera-esque groove metal collides with 100 gecs-style electropop, Daft Punk-ian vocoders, '70s funk and R&B, hip-hop production techniques, jagged bursts of jazz fusion, epic guitar-synth-scapes, cinematic orchestration, roiling emotions and witty verbal asides - and it's all capped by a four-and-a-half minute classically influenced piano solo.Īnd then there's the lyrical content of songs like "Nobody," "We Love You" and "Easier," which examine such weighty concepts as mortality, the destructive-ness of the ego, and what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence. But even a record as ambitious as The Stage - a sprawling, prog-metal concept album about mankind's relationship with science and technology - hasn't prepared the world for the mind-melting scope of Life Is but a Dream… metal titans' second studio album (and first with Gates and bassist Johnny Christ), Avenged Sevenfold have repeatedly defied the expectations of fans and critics while pushing themselves to new heights of creativity and technical proficiency. I called Brian and was like, 'Yeah, dude, we went far enough!'"Įver since 2003's Waking the Fallen, the O.C. This went from Steely Dan/Zappa to Stevie Wonder/Daft Punk to Wizard of Oz/Frank Sinatra real quick!' I'd never freaked myself out with my own music before. "I was kind of sleepy and lying there, listening to it with the volume down, and then all of a sudden I almost had a heart attack. "We wrote them as one song, but recorded them individually, so this was the first time we were actually able to put them together since the demo," he recalls. But Shadows remained unconvinced, at least until he received Andy Wallace's finished mixes of "G," "(O)rdinary" and "(D)eath," the genre-obliterating three-song suite that climaxes the album.
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