Avenged Sevenfold aren’t going to be celebrating old albums on upcoming tours, their singer says.
Everyone from Lamb Of God and Mastodon to Trivium and Bullet For My Valentine are playing their classic records on the road right now, but M. Shadows rules out his band doing the same. In an interview with Rock Feed, he expresses zero interest in commemorating yesteryear’s material on tour – a blow to anyone pining for a City Of Evil 20th anniversary run next year.
“We’re just not a band that wants to go take an old record on tour right now,” Shadows says (via Metal Injection). “It doesn’t interest us, it doesn’t excite us, but one night does. And it really isn’t shots fired, ’cause everyone’s doing those tours. Just for us, personally, it doesn’t wanna make us get out of bed and go do that. But one night seems really fun to us.”
The “one night” Shadows refers to is the recent one-off show where Avenged played material from 2003’s Waking The Fallen and 2005’s City Of Evil at the 1,000-capacity Observatory club in Santa Ana, California. The band did an 11-song set full of resurrected rarities, one of which, Desecrate Through Reverence, hadn’t been performed since 2004. Support came from local punk heroes and longtime Avenged chums Death By Stereo.
Avenged have seemingly been allergic to nostalgia for a while now. Their newest album, 2023’s Life Is But A Dream…, was an avant-garde psych-metal labyrinth that got praised by critics for its ambition but proved divisive amongst longtime fans. Metal Hammer gave the record a glowing nine-out-of-10 review.
Nonetheless, the band played both old and new material when they headlined Download festival in Donington, England, this summer. Metal Hammer editor Eleanor Goodman called the show “a mix of new songs and some of their biggest hits, delivered with the freedom and enjoyment that comes from knowing who they are, with nothing to prove”.
