AVENGED SEVENFOLD Trivia — 177 Entries
177 sourced facts about AVENGED SEVENFOLD.
Trivia
Japan met the band on their third album. Warner Music Japan issued City of Evil here on 7 June 2006 as WPCR-12319, with a sticker of the album sleeve tucked into the first pressing. The same product page announces their first Japanese appearance, at Summer Sonic 06 — the domestic release and the first visit were a single piece of news. Seven years and three albums into their career, they finally had a proper door into this country.
For the 2012 Japanese tour the band let the audience build the set, running a fan vote in advance. M. Shadows explained that requests kept arriving because the same songs came round every night, so they put the choice to the fans. The outcome amused him: what people voted for was largely what the band already played. It had not worked as intended, he said, but it beat being complained at.
Asked in 2013 which shows had stayed with him, Synyster Gates answered that he remembered every one the band had played in Japan. What set the country apart, he said, was the silence between songs: the room listens to whatever is said from the stage, and then, ten seconds later, the moment the next song starts, it goes off. He had found that nowhere else, and read it as a form of respect.
A show at SGC Hall Ariake on 30 September 2026 brought them back to Japan for the first time in twelve years, the last visit having been Summer Sonic in 2014. Their first appearance here was also a Summer Sonic, in 2006, which makes it a twenty-year association. The return was announced in the year that marked a quarter of a century since their debut.
The debut was made on a budget of two thousand dollars. The band was still a quartet at that point — M. Shadows, Zacky Vengeance, bassist Justin Sane and drummer James "The Rev" Sullivan — and The Rev laid down every song in a single take. Everything else was recorded on top of those hurtling drum tracks.
The line-up settled after the debut. Guitarist Synyster Gates arrived in April 2001 and bassist Johnny Christ in September 2002, completing the five-piece that would hold for years. A second guitar made the music heavier and handed them the twin-lead harmonies that became a signature.
On their self-produced fourth album, The Rev’s footprint is at its largest. He is reported to have written around sixty per cent of the record and to have taken co-lead vocals on half of its songs — an unusual amount of authorship for a rock drummer.
After nearly twenty years and seven albums, the first Grammy nomination the band received was for "The Stage", in the Best Rock Song category. Synyster Gates pointed out the irony himself: Hail to the King had been full of three- and four-minute songs that were far more radio-friendly and got nothing, and then they wrote the craziest record of their career and were nominated for it. Writing a long, thematic, progressive opening track, he said, is not something you do while thinking about Grammys or radio.
The Nightmare sleeve was not unveiled in one go. It was cut into eighteen fragments and released over eighteen days, and in a 2010 interview Zacky Vengeance claimed the idea as his own. The band wanted people to study the pieces one at a time, so they drew it out deliberately; as more of the image appeared, he could feel the anticipation building, and that fed back to the band. The point, he said, was to stay connected to the audience away from the venue as well.
The name comes from the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis. After Cain kills his brother, God declares that whoever slays Cain will have vengeance taken on him sevenfold — and that clause, lifted whole, became the band’s name. They had formed in Huntington Beach, California, in 1999.
The winged skull known as the Deathbat was drawn by Micah Montague, a high-school friend of M. Shadows. The band worked out early that they needed a logo, asked their friend to draw one, and paid him twenty dollars for it; as Shadows put it in 2010, it has never changed since. Their fan club took its name from the same image and is called Deathbat Nation.
Jimmy Sullivan — The Rev — helped form the band in 1999 and died at home in Huntington Beach on 28 December 2009, aged twenty-eight. The band mark his memory every night they play, with "So Far Away".
Zacky Vengeance explained in 2010 how Mike Portnoy came to be behind the kit. Portnoy was one of the drummers Jimmy had looked up to, and the two bands had crossed paths at interviews over the previous few years. On hearing of Jimmy’s death, Portnoy got in touch himself and asked what he could do to help. The album could not be postponed simply because a member had gone, so recording had to continue on schedule.
In November 2015 the band named their new drummer: Brooks Wackerman, until then of Bad Religion. His predecessor Arin Ilejay had left that July over creative differences. Wackerman said he had been a fan for a decade and was genuinely thrilled when the call came the year before, and that leaving Bad Religion was a hard decision his bandmates ultimately understood.
"Unholy Confessions" was not written in one room. Zacky Vengeance had a riff he had been playing over and over in the garage that nobody knew what to do with, and the band left on tour with it unresolved. Staying at their booking agent’s house in Chicago, they decided to write a song — and did it by scattering into separate rooms. M. Shadows came back with the chorus. Once home in Orange County, riff and chorus were joined and a deliberately dumb breakdown was dropped in between. They never worked that way again.
The title track of Waking the Fallen was meant to be a full song on the album, but ended up trimmed to a vocal-free intro. Its piano opening stayed with the band, though, and grew into "Beast and the Harlot" on the next record. The complete version finally surfaced as the title track of the tenth-anniversary reissue, Waking the Fallen: Resurrected, in 2014.
"Bat Country" comes out of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Driving toward Vegas in a drug haze, Raoul Duke starts hallucinating bats everywhere, and when his attorney pulls over for a hitchhiker he panics and shouts that they cannot stop here — this is bat country. That line became the title. It never appears in the lyric.
City of Evil’s move away from metalcore left some of the band’s earliest fans behind, and the album dropped off the charts quickly. What turned it round was Good Charlotte: Benji and Joel Madden invited the band onto MTV’s Total Request Live and played the "Bat Country" video. The response was strong enough to keep it on the show, and the song won Best New Artist Video at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards.
"Beast and the Harlot", the song that opens City of Evil, was recorded without the band ever having played it together. M. Shadows has said they wrote it in his garage, never rehearsed it as a band before the session, and that until then it existed only on his computer.
"A Little Piece Of Heaven" came out of The Rev. Synyster Gates remembers that whenever there was a piano in the room he would be playing it, and always playing something of his own. He was proud of the chorus in particular, and would sing it as a joke in a Scooby-Doo voice — he found it cheesy and syrupy, and thought putting something that sweet against the lyric was funny. The orchestration was handled with help from Steve Bartek and Marc Mann, both formerly of Oingo Boingo.
Released in July 2010, Nightmare gave the band their first US number one on the Billboard 200. It was also the first chart-topping album on the Sire imprint since Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993.
"Fiction" was written by The Rev three days before he was found dead on 28 December 2009, which makes it the last song he wrote. It was originally titled "Death", and its lyric is about finding your way once he is no longer there. His own vocals from the demo were kept on the finished track as a tribute. It is the only Avenged Sevenfold song with no guitar on it at all.
"So Far Away" is Synyster Gates’ goodbye to his closest friend, written after The Rev’s death, and the first Avenged Sevenfold song he wrote both lyrically and musically on his own. The acoustic guitar on it is played by his father, Brian Haner Sr. M. Shadows described the intention simply: it should sound like one man with one guitar, talking to his best friend.
"Not Ready To Die" was written to order for Call of the Dead, a downloadable map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops released on 3 May 2011. It was the first time developer Treyarch had commissioned a song from an outside band since the series began in 2003. The band wrote it in four days, in the gap between their Nightmare After Christmas and Welcome to the Family tours.
Hail to the King began with an admission: none of their songs could be played in a bar. M. Shadows said they had become a big band without ever writing something that could sit next to AC/DC or Metallica’s black album — everything of theirs was too complex, too neoclassical. So they wore their influences openly and made a deliberately simplified kind of rock. That was not a dig at those bands, he added: they do it better, and Avenged just wanted to try. It was, he said, deeply unnatural for them.
Released behind its lead single, Hail to the King went to number one on the UK albums chart, entered at number two in Finland and number five in Germany, and topped the Billboard 200 in America. It was the first Avenged Sevenfold album to debut at number one in both the UK and the US.
Hail to the King was recorded at producer Mike Elizondo’s studio — the same room, Synyster Gates pointed out, in which Elizondo had made records with Dr. Dre and 2Pac. A band chasing classic heavy metal ended up cutting it in a space built by a producer out of hip-hop.
The Stage arrived on 28 October 2016 with no advance notice. The band revealed it during a 3D virtual-reality performance streamed live the night before, played on the roof of the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood — announcing the album from the top of the building belonging to the label they had just joined.
In the run-up to The Stage, Deathbats were projected onto buildings around the world, including outside Embankment tube station in London, to the bemusement of commuters. A photograph of the logo on Toronto’s Rogers Centre was posted to Instagram by Chris Jericho, a close friend of the band. The whole campaign carried the hashtag #A7XWorldwide.
"Exist", the fifteen-minute piece that closes The Stage, began with the idea of staging the Big Bang as heavy metal. M. Shadows loved Gustav Holst’s The Planets but noticed that nobody had gone after the Big Bang itself. He had wanted the track to be entirely instrumental; Synyster Gates argued for vocals, and they compromised — the voices come in as Earth, at the point where life begins after the cooling that followed the explosion.
"Exist" ends with a spoken passage by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, written specifically for the album, about the plight of mankind. M. Shadows says Tyson had always been willing to take part in things involving education, so the band pitched it as a way to send their listeners off to learn more — and Tyson rang them back himself and agreed. Their first choice had been a recording of Carl Sagan reading from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, but his estate would not grant permission.
The band did not attend the 60th Grammy Awards. The reason was that Best Rock Song had been dropped from that year’s telecast. M. Shadows was careful to say this was not a protest against the Grammys, but that flying from South Dakota to New York mid-tour and straight back to Oklahoma was not worth it — if the category is pushed off the broadcast and into a room nobody is watching, going is a waste of time and money. The other nominees in the category were Metallica, K.Flay, Nothing More and Foo Fighters.
Life Is But a Dream… was written and recorded over four years, and the thinking of the French writer Albert Camus runs through it — both his absurdism, which holds that life has no discernible meaning, and the existentialism that questions why human beings are here at all. On the album’s pre-order page the band described it as a journey through an existential crisis: a personal enquiry into the meaning, purpose and value of human existence, with the anxiety of death always in the room.
"Nobody" was played live for the first time on 12 May 2023 at AREA15 in Las Vegas — a show that also marked the band’s return to the stage after almost five years away. Their previous concert had been on 30 June 2018 in Sopron, Hungary.
The band’s Warner contract ran out with Life Is But a Dream… in June 2023, and they became fully independent. M. Shadows counts eight records made for the label, and says he can no longer see the point of being signed to one. His reasoning is blunt: there is no radio that matters and no MTV, TikTok is something anyone can do themselves, and in his view a label brings nothing extra to the table.
The label’s own profile keeps the itinerary short. Summer Sonic in 2006 and again in 2007, the self-titled album in November 2007, their first headline tour of Japan in January 2008, and the Loud Park festival that October. Read as dates alone, it is a two-year account of a band moving from a festival slot to shows of their own in this country.
Their October 2008 stay in Japan was built out of four nights. The 15th at Namba Hatch in Osaka, the 16th at Club Diamond Hall in Nagoya, the 18th at Saitama Super Arena for Loud Park '08, and on the 20th a bill at Shinkiba Studio Coast billed as "Avenged Sevenfold vs Bullet For My Valentine Special Gig". A festival, two halls and a head-to-head with their British contemporaries, all inside five days.
The headline run of April 2012 covered four cities in four nights: Club Citta in Kawasaki on the 14th, Zepp Tokyo on the 16th, Diamond Hall in Nagoya on the 18th and Namba Hatch in Osaka on the 19th. Tickets were 6,500 yen, with reserved balcony seats in Tokyo and Osaka at 7,500. The label described it as their first Japanese shows in around a year and a half, counting back to Loud Park 10.
The Japanese pressing of the self-titled album came out on 7 November 2007 as WPCR-12770, and closed with a bonus track available only here: a live version of "Almost Easy" in the eleventh slot. The production credit on the page reads simply Avenged Sevenfold. The label framed the record by asking whether a self-titled album could do for them what the black album did for Metallica.
The Japanese edition of Nightmare — a first-press "value price" pressing dated 28 July 2010, catalogue number WPCR-13880 — carries "Lost It All" in twelfth place as a bonus track for this territory only. The credits name Mike Elizondo as producer and Mike Portnoy as guest drummer, so the circumstances of the sessions, recorded in the months after The Rev’s death, are written into the packaging itself.
On 17 June 2010 the label published the sleeve and the running order for Nightmare. Every title is set in Japanese katakana, and only the twelfth, "Lost It All", carries a note: bonus track, Japanese edition only. The same announcement signs off by confirming that the band would be back for Loud Park 10.
Warner Music Japan’s profile is specific about what M. Shadows grew up on: Pantera, Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer and Guns N’ Roses. The last of those looms largest — his favourite records, the page says, are Use Your Illusion I and II — and it offers a piece of evidence for the claim: onstage, the band have been known to drop the intro to "Paradise City" into the set.
17 October 2010, Loud Park 10 at Saitama Super Arena. It was the year after The Rev’s death, with Mike Portnoy behind the kit, and their first return to the festival in two years. The backdrop was the Nightmare artwork and the opening number was the album’s title track. After a few words thanking the fans who had stayed with them, the band played "So Far Away"; the set closed with "Almost Easy".
The Kawasaki Club Citta show on 14 April 2012 opened the tour and sold out. Cameras were in the room, and from the stage M. Shadows told the audience the Japanese footage was headed for a DVD and asked them for a mosh pit worth filming. The set ran about ninety minutes, opening with "Nightmare", ending its main body with "Bat Country" and returning for "Fiction" and "Unholy Confessions".
That the set would change from night to night was announced from the stage as well. On the opening night in Kawasaki, M. Shadows asked how many in the room were also coming to Tokyo on the 16th, and told them that show would not be the same. It was a promise only a fan-voted tour could make.
On the evening of 2 June 2023, the day the album reached Japanese shops, Tower Records Shibuya hosted a listening party and talk event for Life Is But a Dream…. The whole record was played from vinyl while its background and the band’s recent history were discussed, and admission was free. Anyone who bought or collected the album in the store that day was entered into a prize draw.
Just after the January 2008 headline tour, Synyster Gates told Gekirock that although it was not their first time in the country, he had gone into these shows feeling as though he were playing Japan for the first time. Two Summer Sonic slots and a run of shows under their own name were, from the inside, different experiences. Next time, he added, the production would be bigger and the sets longer.
On 28 July 2026 a four-track EP called Statica appeared without warning: "Lights", "Statica", "Rejoice" and "Ashes". The band dropped it just before starting a North American tour with Good Charlotte. Two months later they were due in Japan, at SGC Hall Ariake on 30 September.
The Japanese product page for City of Evil leads with the numbers as they stood at the time of release: a gold disc for passing half a million copies in the United States, and "Bat Country" reaching number one on MTV’s Total Request Live. The two facts that pushed the band into the mainstream were exactly the two the Japanese label chose as its pitch. Mudrock is credited as producer on the same page.
The night before Hail to the King reached American shops — 26 August 2013 — the band played a free show at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. The label described it as a thank-you to their audience and a chance to mark the release together. The same announcement laid out an arena tour running from Chicago on 3 October to Las Vegas on the 26th.
Deftones and Ghost B.C. joined the Hail to the King tour of October 2013 as special guests. According to the label, it was the band’s first full-scale American tour since their 2011 run — a two-and-a-half-year gap, closed at arena size.
"Streets", the melodic punk song on the debut, was not written for this band. M. Shadows brought it over from Successful Failure, the group he had been in before. Most of the album sits around the four-minute mark, and no later Avenged Sevenfold record would ever again be built out of songs that short.
On Waking the Fallen, co-producer Mudrock deliberately reined The Rev in, balancing chaos against control, while the band pushed M. Shadows to sing rather than only scream — a shift shaped by the vocal surgery he had around 2002 and the two years it took him to recover fully. That change of approach defined the album that followed, and it did not sit well with some of their earliest listeners.
For City of Evil, M. Shadows worked with a vocal coach so that he could keep a gritty metal edge without wrecking his voice the way he had as a younger man. On the recordings he swapped outright screaming for a disciplined delivery that kept the grit and the power. He still takes on plenty of screams live, but from then on bassist Johnny Christ handled some of them onstage.
"Sidewinder" on City of Evil ends in a long Latin coda, and the Spanish guitar in it is played by Brian Haner, Synyster Gates’ father. The song itself tracks a venomous snake hunting its prey, and opens with the sound of hissing.
The self-titled album ends with "Dear God", a slow, country-leaning ballad about loneliness and longing on the road, whose video is built to recall Journey’s "Faithfully". Given that the track before it is the eight-minute orchestral horror show of "A Little Piece Of Heaven", the drop between the album’s last two songs is considerable.
Nightmare was meant to be the band’s first concept album. The Rev’s death broke that plan, and the record ended up conceptual in a different way: song after song deals with the band’s own grief and pain over losing him.
In November 2012 the band appeared as characters inside Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Warner Music Japan’s announcement described this as the first time an artist had appeared in a game as a character. They had written "Carry On" for the game, and in January 2013 the song reached number one on a Billboard monitored chart.
The Stage was the band’s first genuine concept album — thematic rather than narrative, built around artificial intelligence and humanity’s place in the universe. It opens with a gothic keyboard passage in the spirit of Ozzy Osbourne’s "Mr. Crowley", out of which the pounding tom work of their new drummer announces itself.
Joe Barresi produced The Stage, the first time the band had worked with him, and pushed them toward the feel of their live show. For M. Shadows that meant something he had never done: full-song vocal takes, singing from the first lyric to the last without stopping, so that the strain audibly builds as the song goes on. The strain is the point — it is what makes it sound live.
At the time of that first Grammy nomination the band had just released Live At The GRAMMY Museum, their first acoustic recording — the first in a career approaching twenty years.
By the time their eighth album appeared, the band’s tally stood at five platinum-selling records, two number one albums and one Grammy nomination — the accumulated arithmetic of nearly twenty-five years that began in a garage in Huntington Beach.
The title track of Nightmare was the most-played song on American rock radio in 2010, once classic rock titles are set aside. The album produced three number ones on that format: "Nightmare", "So Far Away" and "Welcome to the Family".
The governing idea on Life Is But a Dream… is everything but the kitchen sink, and behind it stands Mike Patton and his experimental band Mr. Bungle. When M. Shadows announced that they would be working with an orchestra, most people pictured something along the lines of Metallica’s S&M; what arrived was the opposite. Half the songs run three to four minutes — half the length of a typical Avenged Sevenfold track.
On Life Is But a Dream… the swerves happen inside the songs. A breakneck thrash tempo dissolves into flute, piano and acoustic guitar on "Game Over"; monotone vocals and atonal industrial noise take over "We Love You"; hypnotic horns and rising vocals push through guitar dissonance on "Cosmic". The last four tracks alone reach for Broadway, funk, jazz, a Sinatra-shaped ballad and, at the end, a neo-classical piano instrumental.
Between legs of the 2010–11 touring cycle the band played US military bases in Kuwait and Iraq on a USO tour. As M. Shadows told it, the USO normally books pop and country acts, and a loud rock band being asked at all was unusual. The request came from the other direction: soldiers said they wanted to see the band, and the USO approached them because of it.
The man who brought them to Warner Bros. was A&R executive Craig Aaronson, who had already signed Green Day, My Chemical Romance and The Used to the label, and who took the band off Hopeless Records in the summer of 2004. When Aaronson died in 2014 the band published a statement saying they had been sceptical at first, having heard nothing but horror stories about independent acts signing to majors, and that trusting him and the label turned out to be the right call.
In 2016 the band moved to leave Warner Bros. by invoking what California labour law calls the seven-year rule — a personal service contract cannot be enforced beyond seven years — and the label sued. M. Shadows put the reasoning plainly: after repeated changes of management at the company, nobody there knew or cared about the band any more. They took less money to go elsewhere and accepted a lawsuit rather than release a record and watch it be ignored.
Warner issued a compilation, The Best Of 2005-2013, on 2 December 2016 with no input from the band at all. M. Shadows said they found out it was happening by seeing it online, called it a grab for money, and told the audience that if they wanted those songs they could build the playlist themselves on Spotify.
The Stage was the first album the band released after the split with Warner Bros., and their first for Capitol Records. Three years on from Hail to the King, the opening move at the new label was to put a whole record out with no warning at all.
"Chapter Four" on Waking the Fallen takes its subject from the same place the band took their name. The title points at the fourth chapter of Genesis — the one in which Cain kills Abel and the first murder on earth is committed. The verse that gave them a name and the chapter that gave them a song are the same few pages of text.
They were seventeen when the songs were written. M. Shadows recalls the record being put together on acoustic guitars in class, by people who knew nothing about recording, click tracks or production. Zacky Vengeance remembers it the same way: they turned up with a million ideas and a tiny budget, and no real idea what they were doing.
The first demo was cut in 1999 by the four-piece and ran to three songs: "Forgotten Faces", "Thick And Thin" and "The Art Of Subconscious Illusion". The line-up was M. Shadows, Zacky Vengeance, a drummer then billing himself as The Reverend Tholomew Plague, and bassist Matthew Wendt. In 2000 it grew to five with "Lips Of Deceit" and "We Come Out At Night", and all five were re-recorded for the 2001 debut album.
The first Avenged Sevenfold recording to feature Synyster Gates was a re-cut of the debut album’s opening track, issued as "To End The Rapture (Heavy Metal Version)" on the 2001 EP Warmness On The Soul. When the debut was later reissued, that take replaced the original on the album itself.
Looking for a producer for their second album, the band sent their material to Andy Sneap. The reply was an email saying he would never work with them. M. Shadows says they ran into Sneap in London after City of Evil came out and laughed about it — he told them he had had no idea it would turn into this, and that he felt terrible.
When work on Waking the Fallen began in 2003, producer Andrew "Mudrock" Murdock told Zacky Vengeance to his face that he was not much of a guitar player. Zacky, recalling it in 2014, reckoned Murdock had been trying to get him thrown out of the band. Born Zachary James Baker, he had taken the stage surname Vengeance as an answer to everyone in his life who doubted he would amount to anything.
The sleeve of Hail to the King does one thing: it fills the front and the back with a Deathbat against black. It was also the last time Micah Montague, who drew the logo, saw his own work on the cover of an album. He died in 2016.
The debut’s title reaches into chapter 11 of the Book of Revelation, where seven angels blowing trumpets herald the end of the world — a second biblical borrowing from a band who had already taken their name out of Genesis. The suitably celestial artwork was made by Adam Barton, a tattooist based in Santa Cruz, California, who had already put ink on M. Shadows.
Waking the Fallen is remembered as the Deathbat sleeve, but at the time the symbol was only printed on the CD’s slipcase. The booklet inside opened with a darkly majestic painting by Taylor Montague. Every edition since has led with the Deathbat, so the original arrangement has quietly disappeared.
At seventy-two minutes City of Evil is by a distance their longest album, and it was also their major-label debut for Warner Bros. Graphic designer Casey Howard reworked the Deathbat for the cover as a winged demon on horseback, riding away and leaving nothing behind but fire and scorched ground.
The self-titled album carries no text at all on its front, and its image is a palette-swap of the one already used on Waking the Fallen. The elaborate work went into the booklet instead, where Casey Howard drew a set of black-and-white pieces visualising the themes of individual songs. The music took in orchestras and country; the packaging around it was stripped to the bone.
The cover of Nightmare was painted by Travis Smith, whose commissions have included Opeth, Death, Devin Townsend and Overkill. At the centre of the image is a grave, and carved into it is the word "foREVer" — three capitals in the middle of the word, so that The Rev’s name sits inside "forever".
The Stage’s cover is a cosmic scene with the Earth at its centre, ringed by lightning and green fog — and the Deathbat is hiding in it. The fog resolves into a skull, and the forks of lightning on either side read as wings. The credit goes to a design studio called Butcher & Baker Workshop, whose name looks less mysterious once you know that Zacky Vengeance was born Zachary Baker.
For Life Is But a Dream… the band handed the artwork to minimalist painter Wes Lang, who not only made the cover but designed an entirely new Deathbat. The result — black paint on a beige ground, and nothing else — was described by the band as their album’s existentialism turned into visual art. The lyrics lean on Albert Camus, who held that life has no discernible meaning.
The sleeve of Live In The LBC & Diamonds In The Rough puts skeletal caricatures of the five members in the foreground and a drawing of Long Beach, California, behind them — a nod to 10 April 2008, when they headlined the Rockstar Taste Of Chaos tour there. The arena in question is still better known for something else: Iron Maiden recorded Live After Death in it in 1985.
After The Rev’s death the band considered stopping altogether. The decision to carry on came in February 2010, announced together with the news that they had already begun recording new material with Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. What came of that decision was Nightmare.
The first time the band entered a studio without The Rev came days after his death. Zacky Vengeance said the writing had been all but finished before he died, so every song on the record had been made by the five of them together. Once recording started, though, the same songs sounded different: newer, darker, sadder and somehow mysterious. His death, Zacky felt, had given the album its depth.
Wackerman’s name had actually come up years earlier, around Nightmare. Speaking on Chris Jericho’s podcast in November 2015, M. Shadows said their tour manager had suggested him at the time, but that Wackerman was busy with Bad Religion and would have been seen as a punk drummer — which is why, then and now, Shadows regards Portnoy as having been the right choice for that record.
Brooks Wackerman’s first gig with the band was a free show on 18 August at First Avenue, the venerable Minneapolis club. Footage of it went up on the band’s YouTube channel as a short documentary clip in 2016, while the wait for the next album was still running.
In August 2013, with Hail to the King finished, Arin Ilejay had still not given the band an answer about becoming a full member. M. Shadows said they treated him as one and were leaving the decision to him: Ilejay was getting married in a fortnight, and whether he wanted a life spent permanently on the road with the band was not yet clear. Nobody, Shadows said, was rushing him.
Brian Haner Sr., father of Synyster Gates, played guitar on every Avenged Sevenfold album from City of Evil in 2005 through to Hail to the King in 2013. A musician and comedian by trade, he is described by his son as his inspiration, his hero and his best friend.
Valary DiBenedetto, M. Shadows’ wife, had been his closest friend since the sixth grade. She provided vocals on "The Art Of Subconscious Illusion" on the debut album and moved from selling the band’s merch to managing their tours. They married on 17 October 2009, and the following year her twin sister Michelle married Synyster Gates.
Zacky Vengeance’s relationship with Schecter began with an accident at a British show. A fan climbing onstage knocked over a mic stand and destroyed his main guitar. He got through the night on his spare, but the broken instrument was due to be used in a video shoot the following day — and, being left-handed, he could not simply find a replacement. Schecter offered him one without hesitation. The company then took to Synyster Gates as well, and both guitarists ended up endorsed by them.
Synyster Gates recorded Hail to the King through an amplifier of his own design, the Hellwin. He had spent two years designing it, and said he used the series for everything on the album — rhythm parts and solos alike. Having built his own amp, he added, was something he was proud of.
The female screams on "The Art Of Subconscious Illusion", from the debut album, belong to Valary DiBenedetto, at the time M. Shadows’ girlfriend and the band’s manager. The two married in 2009. Her voice turns up in the same role again on "Scream" in 2007.
Waking the Fallen sold more than a hundred thousand copies in its first year on Hopeless Records — a striking figure for an independent release, and the one that put the band on the radar of America’s A&R scouts and started the bidding.
"Unholy Confessions" was never really released as a single in the first place. M. Shadows says the songs they put out were "Chapter Four" and "Eternal Rest". During the bidding war over their next album, whichever label signed them wanted a video for something off Waking the Fallen — so once they signed to Warner Bros., a clip was made for this song to build momentum ahead of City of Evil, well after the album itself had come and gone.
"Unholy Confessions" is the song Avenged Sevenfold have played live more than any other. As their early material was pushed out of the set it stayed, usually as the last thing before the encore. M. Shadows likens it to Metallica’s "Hit The Lights" — one of the first things people heard from them, and a pleasing way to throw the end of the night back to 2003.
The two-part, thirteen-minute "I Won't See You Tonight" was written single-handedly by Synyster Gates. The first half takes the point of view of someone contemplating suicide; the second belongs to a friend left behind. It is often cited as the moment the guitarist who had joined in 2000 lifted the band’s ambitions a level.
The opening line of "Bat Country" is not the band’s own: it is a remark by the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson about a man who makes a beast of himself escaping the pain of being a man. The same sentence stands at the head of the Hunter S. Thompson novel the song takes its title from. They borrowed the title from the book and the first line from the book’s own epigraph.
The field "Bat Country" beat for Best New Artist at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards was Rihanna, Chris Brown, Panic! At The Disco, Angels & Airwaves and James Blunt — a metal band taking the prize in the middle of a pop bracket.
The headlong intro to "Beast and the Harlot" was originally written on piano. Zacky Vengeance says the band were deep into Velvet Revolver at the time and wanted some of that swagger in the song. Rather than open the album with a slow piano build, as they had done before, they decided to come out with double kick drums and screaming guitars. Gates and Shadows did most of the writing, but Zacky keeps returning to the point that the track is carried by The Rev’s drumming.
Zacky Vengeance says he never expected "Beast and the Harlot" to be a single, let alone a favourite. He thought it was simply a good way to start the album. Once they took the record on the road, it became obvious very quickly which song the crowds were reacting to most.
"Betrayed" is about Dimebag Darrell, the former Pantera guitarist shot dead onstage at a club in Columbus, Ohio on 8 December 2004, and it addresses his killer as much as it mourns him. M. Shadows has said you know it is Dimebag the instant the guitar comes in, that he was an innovator and the best there was, and that he remains one of his own biggest influences.
At nine minutes and fourteen seconds, "Strength Of The World" is shaped by the music Ennio Morricone wrote for westerns like The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and A Fistful Of Dollars, and its lyric follows the genre exactly: a man whose family has been killed goes looking for the men who did it. M. Shadows describes it as a song about vengeance rather than anger — cold-blooded revenge without fury, which is what he finds so western about it.
The gang vocals that appear on songs like "Strength Of The World" — everyone shouting the title together — became a fixture of their records and their shows. Recording them tends to collapse into laughter, since none of the band’s voices are especially metal apart from M. Shadows’. On "Almost Easy" in 2007 all five members crowded into the vocal booth to sing the answering lines.
"M.I.A.", which closes City of Evil, is about American soldiers fighting in Iraq. The band had friends who served, and rather than argue a political position they wanted to put across the view of one person going into battle. The title stands for Missing In Action, the designation for a soldier who may have been killed or captured in combat.
M. Shadows describes "Seize The Day" as a song about thinking twice before you act. Everything can be gone in two minutes, so keep the people you love close: that, he says, is what seizing the day means here.
"Almost Easy" was written by the band’s drummer, The Rev. He played several instruments, so he demoed it himself on guitar and keyboard to show the others what he had in mind. The song had been intended for the 2007 film Transformers but was not finished in time for its June release, and came out instead on 18 September that year as the first single from the album. It later appeared on the soundtrack to the sequel, though not in the film itself.
"Critical Acclaim", the first single from the self-titled album, opens with a long organ passage played by session musician Jamie Muhoberac. The Rev sings additional vocals on the same track, and his voice can also be heard on "A Little Piece Of Heaven" and "Scream".
"A Little Piece Of Heaven" was started for a Halloween EP and very nearly did not make the album at all. Synyster Gates admits that the arrangement was such a monumental job that neither he nor The Rev wanted to work on it; the one who kept pushing was M. Shadows. The moment they began recording, everyone realised what they had, and the label told them it was not an EP track — it belonged on the record.
Oingo Boingo — the Los Angeles new wave band that first gave Danny Elfman a platform — mattered enormously to both The Rev and Synyster Gates. That is why two former members, Steve Bartek and Marc Mann, were brought in to arrange the strings on "A Little Piece Of Heaven" and "Afterlife" on the 2007 self-titled album. In one of his last interviews, The Rev called Elfman his musical hero.
On "Lost", from the self-titled album, M. Shadows’ voice runs through Auto-Tune in the bridge and chorus. The effect was everywhere in hip-hop at the time and the band tried it because they thought it would be fun — a fitting choice on a record built to defy what people expected of them.
"Unbound (The Wild Ride)" has piano, very melodic singing and a children’s choir at the end. Fans tend to like it; M. Shadows does not. In an online exchange in 2017 he named it his least favourite Avenged Sevenfold song ever to make it onto a record, saying it was a little sugary for his taste.
"Brompton Cocktail" follows a terminally ill patient asking his doctor for a lethal dose. The title refers to a mixture of morphine, heroin and cocaine known by that name. The song raises the question of a person’s right to die, at a time when assisted suicide was legal in only a handful of American states.
The title Nightmare was settled before The Rev died. Zacky Vengeance explained that the songs came partly from the band’s own frustration and confusion, and partly from what was on the television — civil wars, children going hungry, economies collapsing — all of it feeling like a nightmare you have with your eyes open. After Jimmy’s death the same word meant something else entirely: the worst nightmare they had lived through, he said, was losing him.
The idea for the title track arrived on M. Shadows’ wedding day. He detoured to the studio to bang out a demo, which did not go down well with his fiancée at the time. She has since forgiven him — the album the song opens went to number one in America.
The video for "Nightmare" was directed by Wayne Isham, whose credits include Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Metallica. Johnny Christ has said the band had not planned to make a video at all, but wanted to pay tribute, so they went to a director they trusted. Isham came back with a treatment drawn from the film Jacob’s Ladder, and both song and clip carry things that stand for Jimmy.
Mike Portnoy has said that "Fiction" is a thousand per cent Jimmy — that he would not have played the drum parts that way himself, and would have played less. The original demo had Jimmy on piano and drums and singing. Portnoy tracked his own drums against that demo, so while the rest of the album was played with the band in the room, this one, as he put it, came out as a duet between him and The Rev.
"Save Me", which closes Nightmare, runs to ten minutes and fifty-seven seconds — the longest track the band have ever recorded. It deals with what The Rev’s death did to the band and the size of the pain his bandmates were carrying.
"God Hates Us" on Nightmare is, as its title suggests, a song about anger at things not going right. Zacky Vengeance described it as a direct expression of what the band were feeling while making the record, adding that the anger in it is not mindless shouting but something sadder and darker underneath.
"Welcome To The Family", the second single from Nightmare, was also inspired by The Rev. M. Shadows and Johnny Christ said as much in the making-of series the band posted on YouTube while the album was being put together.
The seven-minute-plus "Not Ready To Die" was also the first Avenged Sevenfold recording to feature drummer Arin Ilejay. In the game it sits as an easter egg, and its lyric follows the zombie storyline. M. Shadows said he was a big fan of the game, played it constantly, and got caught up in the story.
"Carry On" plays over the end credits of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and the game shows the band performing it. M. Shadows says that once the call came they had three days to write it and a couple to record it, with motion capture waiting on top of that. The animation required the song to run under four minutes, which is why it is more compact than most of their work.
"Shepherd Of Fire", which opens Hail to the King, was handed to Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s fourth and final downloadable pack, Apocalypse, where it plays over the opening cinematic of the zombie map Origins. It was the band’s third contribution to the series, after "Not Ready to Die" and "Carry On".
The 2015 instrumental "Jade Helm" was written for part of the multiplayer soundtrack of Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Its title refers to Jade Helm 15, the American military exercise staged across several states between July and September that year, and to the conspiracy theories that grew up around it.
In September 2018, timed to the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the band put out a four-track EP called Black Reign. Only one song on it was new — "Mad Hatter" — with the other three being the pieces they had already written for the Black Ops series: "Not Ready to Die", "Carry On" and "Jade Helm". The game turns on a zombie outbreak, but M. Shadows said they wanted something dark and brooding rather than a straight-ahead zombie-killer track.
"Mad Hatter" started with a Twitter takeover. A fan asked M. Shadows about the band doing music for Black Ops III, the team at Treyarch saw the exchange, and an invitation followed. With a European tour looming, they had a month to deliver a finished piece.
The first lyric finished for Hail to the King was "Heretic", the album’s seventh track. M. Shadows described it as melodic and in a minor key, with something of a Marty Friedman feel. Straight afterwards the band shifted toward the bluesier, groove-led material that fills the rest of the record, which leaves "Heretic" standing slightly apart. They kept it, Shadows said, because they liked it.
The intro Synyster Gates plays on the title track comes out of gypsy jazz. He had been working through Django Reinhardt and others at the time and applied the technique to metal; the solo itself sits on minor blues changes. People often mistake it for neoclassical playing, he says, but it is gypsy jazz.
The cover painting for Hail to the King is the work of southern Californian artist Cam Rackam and carries its own title, Deadly Rule. He told Noisecreep that he had taken his cue from the final shot of Conan the Barbarian — itself referencing a Frazetta painting — with the warrior seated on the throne contemplating the chaos of his kingdom. Pentagrams, inverted crosses and similar devices were added to match the album’s themes.
"Hail to the King" was one of the official theme songs of WrestleMania 32 and became a staple at sporting events. M. Shadows has said that hearing it played the way an arena plays "Crazy Train" is a strange pleasure: the band are rock people, but they are sports people too, and it makes them quietly happy.
Asked which song he uses to introduce the band to someone who does not know them, M. Shadows names "Hail to the King" — not because it is his favourite. If he wanted to show off something he was proud of, he says, he would start with "The Stage", "Buried Alive" or "Exist". But for getting someone from outside the scene through the door, this is the one that works.
The experiment turned into their biggest song. M. Shadows has noted that "Hail to the King" streams more than twice as much per week as anything else they have recorded and that the album outsells all the others, while a section of the fanbase still treats it as a failure. Unfortunately, he said, the experiment worked.
Synyster Gates describes "Requiem" on Hail to the King as a metal band’s attempt at classical orchestration. He treated M. Shadows’ vocal as a lead violin line and his own chugging guitar as the low brass would be, layering the parts carefully. The choir sings in English, and the phrase that keeps returning is "in flames".
"Coming Home" is a touring song. M. Shadows explained that the line about standing in hell refers to being in Iraq, in 126-degree heat, standing inside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces — a place most people never see, recast as looking the devil in the eye. Whatever you do around the world, he said, what you want at the end of it is to come home to the people you love.
"Doing Time" is set in Johnny’s Saloon, the band’s regular bar in Huntington Beach. M. Shadows called it a song about the prison in your head — the prison of going somewhere to drink your problems away. They had written parts of Waking the Fallen and City of Evil in that bar, and went back most nights while making Hail to the King.
Two children stand behind the ballad "Crimson Day". Synyster Gates said the lyric was inspired by his nephew; M. Shadows said that, having had a son the previous summer, he wrote it as a story bridging the loss of Jimmy and a new life. His son, Owen James Sanders, was born on 5 July 2012.
M. Shadows is not, however, a fan of "Crimson Day". In a 2024 interview he called it a throwaway and said it is not a good ballad — the band have written much better ones — placing it at the very bottom of everything they have done.
"Planets" and "Acid Rain" on Hail to the King are two halves of one story. Synyster Gates described "Planets" as an intergalactic war ending in apocalypse, with the human species finally uniting to fight something far greater than itself. "Acid Rain" picks up afterwards: cast into space to die alongside the person who matters to you once the planets have collided. It is, he said, an apocalyptic love story, which was unusual territory for them.
"This Means War" is not about warfare. M. Shadows said it has nothing to do with going to Iraq and shooting people, and everything to do with the war inside your head and living with the decisions you make. Synyster Gates’ solos began as improvisations; for this one he was hearing something chaotic at the start — a machine-gun spray — that would resolve into melody.
M. Shadows explained the surprise to Rolling Stone. Everyone else drops four or five singles first, he said, which takes all the mystique out of a record; by the time it appears you have already done fifty interviews about what it is and how it sounds. Their alternative was to hand it over whole — here it is, we spent a long time on it — and let everyone learn about it together afterwards.
Just before the release, Chris Jericho put out false information in collusion with M. Shadows: the seventh album would be called Voltaic Oceans and would land on 9 December. The post — a Deathbat with a date attached — was deleted quickly, but the rumour had already travelled. The actual album appeared on 28 October under a different name.
Around the same time the official site, avengedsevenfold.com, went dark and then reappeared as a redirect to deathbot.net, where visitors were greeted by a disembodied robot skull and a box in which to type questions. The Deathbot answered with cryptic statements and contradictory dates — the 11th of November should be a fun day, the 18th of November should be a fun day — and gave nothing away.
The eight-and-a-half-minute title track was the first Avenged Sevenfold recording with Brooks Wackerman behind the kit, and they played it live for the first time on 15 October 2016 at Knotfest in Toluca, Mexico — thirteen days before the album existed. They opened a headline festival set with eight and a half minutes of music nobody had heard.
The video for "The Stage" plays out on a marionette stage, with humanity killing itself through history. It was directed by Chris Hopewell, best known for his work with Radiohead, in collaboration with Zacky Vengeance, whose starting idea was to capture the dark side of humanity and history repeating itself. The visual cue came from "The Lonely Goatherd" in the 1965 film of The Sound Of Music, where Maria and the children put on a puppet show.
The artificial intelligence that runs through The Stage reached M. Shadows through a single article: someone sent him Tim Urban’s piece on AI for the website Wait But Why, and he came away feeling he had to learn about it. From there he worked through Sam Harris’s writing and podcasts and compared the conflicting positions of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. This, he decided, was something his generation would eventually have to answer for.
"Paradigm" is about nanotechnology, and nanobots in particular. M. Shadows raises their potential to cure disease and extend life indefinitely, then asks the obvious follow-up: if you end up seventy per cent machine and thirty per cent human, how much of you is left? The song rests on the assumption that this is close at hand.
The horns on "Sunny Disposition", from The Stage, are played by Angelo Moore and "Dirty" Walter Kibby of Fishbone. M. Shadows described the song itself as being about nuclear war and the class system.
"Dose" was written for the 2016 version of The Stage, missed the deadline, and was added to the album the following year. Its lyric comes from an unsolved story dating to the 1950s: a traveller who arrived at a Tokyo airport carrying a passport from a country that appeared on no map, was detained, and then vanished from a room under guard. M. Shadows said he had no idea whether the story is true, but that he is fascinated by that kind of thing and thought it would make a good song.
"Fermi Paradox" takes its title from the contradiction identified by the physicist Enrico Fermi: probability suggests intelligent life should be common in the universe, and yet there is no evidence of it. M. Shadows said the song does not attempt an answer. Instead it takes a human vantage point, wondering what our ancestors did before all this technology — we spend the day looking into our phones, where once people looked up at the stars to work things out.
"Nobody" was the lead single from the eighth album and the band’s first new song since "Mad Hatter" in 2018 — a gap of five years. Its six-minute stop-motion video was made by Chris Hopewell, best known for his work with Radiohead, who had previously worked with Zacky Vengeance on the video for "The Stage".
The band stopped in 2018 because M. Shadows developed a blood blister on his vocal folds and had to rest his voice for months. Over the four years that followed, the next album came together very gradually, and touring only resumed in 2023, when Life Is But a Dream… was finally finished.
Life Is But a Dream… was co-produced by the band with Joe Barresi and mixed by Andy Wallace. Their eighth album takes as its subject the meaning of human existence and the fear of death, and the band have said it draws on Camus’ L’Étranger — a novel that has become shorthand for the literature of the absurd, and whose collision of despair and hope the record mirrors.
"We Love You" also exists in a second form, retitled "We Love You Moar", with Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot as guest vocalist. Pussy Riot were among the opening acts at the band’s Madison Square Garden show in New York in June 2023.
The chant at the heart of "We Love You" came to M. Shadows in the shower — a string of demands, more and more and more — and he described it as the moment the song clicked. The music around it moves between gentle acoustic passages and pulsing industrial ones, and carries some of the harshest screaming in the band’s catalogue.
Statica, the EP that appeared without warning in July 2026, runs four songs and eighteen minutes and seven seconds. It is built from robotic vocals, science-fiction synthesisers and electronic dance rhythms, with none of the classic rock and eighties metal homages that colour City of Evil or Hail to the King. It extends the experimental line that runs from The Stage in 2016 through Life Is But a Dream… in 2023.
In 2014 the band put out a self-funded video game, Hail To The King: Deathbat, a third-person fantasy adventure RPG set in a mythical kingdom called Haides and built around the origin of their own logo. M. Shadows told the Los Angeles Times that the game had more or less written itself visually, and noted that a band like Mumford & Sons or Coldplay would have nothing to make a game out of.
In 2022 the Deathbat turned up as a playable character in Iron Maiden’s mobile game Legacy of the Beast. Three of them were chosen by the band’s Deathbats fan club — one band’s mascot walking into a game built entirely around another’s.
Seventeen years into their career the band had released just three cover versions. Iron Maiden’s "Flash Of The Blade" and Pantera’s "Walk" were both recorded for magazine covermount CDs; the third, Black Sabbath’s "Paranoid", appeared on the Warner compilation Covered – A Revolution In Sound. Their own choice for that compilation had been Mr. Bungle’s "Stubb (A Dub)", which the label vetoed. Synyster Gates names Mr. Bungle as his favourite band of all.
There is a song called "Satan Sandwich". It has never been recorded, and it has been played live exactly once — at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles on 29 October 2007. Footage of that night exists on YouTube, but making out a lyric or a riff is close to impossible: the noise from the crowd covers everything.
The band played outside the United States for the first time in February 2004, at the London Astoria, supporting Lostprophets and The Bronx. The 2,000-capacity theatre has since been demolished. Zacky Vengeance remembers it as their first real taste of touring, done in a six-passenger van. The United Kingdom was where they broke internationally first.
The relationship with Metallica runs deep. The two bands have toured together on several occasions; Lars Ulrich has called Avenged Sevenfold near and dear to his own band, and James Hetfield personally introduced their set at Metallica’s Orion festival and said he liked everything they do.
In 2009 the band shared a stage in Los Angeles with Slash for a version of Guns N’ Roses’ "It’s So Easy". They rarely record covers, but onstage they have taken on Pantera’s "Walk" and Iron Maiden’s "Flash of the Blade".
The band took their name and many of their subjects from the Bible, but none of them has ever identified publicly as Christian. In a 2013 interview M. Shadows said he has beliefs of his own but does not believe in religion as it exists today; he tries to stay out of the subject because plenty of their fans are Christians and plenty are not — but they are definitely not a Christian band.
"Heretic" is about religious fanaticism and witch hunts. M. Shadows cited the Salem witch trials and the West Memphis Three, and described it as a song about being jailed for life for the clothes you wear or the length of your hair — about people so clouded by belief that they cannot look at facts. It is, he said, a step back to say that you need not turn up at someone’s door ready to burn them before they have had a chance to explain themselves.
The figure at the centre of "Shepherd Of Fire" is not a devil of fire and brimstone but one who talks you downward, promising a better life than the man upstairs can offer. M. Shadows likened the setup to the Rolling Stones’ "Sympathy For The Devil". And the sound at the start of the track that resembles rain is in fact fire.
"Remenissions" is not a real word, and it never appears in the lyric. The song is about war and humanity’s habit of killing its own, written in a period when M. Shadows was producing a good deal of material about mass destruction, often with the Bible in hand.
"Radiant Eclipse" on Waking the Fallen runs six minutes and ten seconds and can be read either as a song about dying or about being betrayed by a friend. It opens with the narrator shot two nights earlier, and the friend who pulled the trigger. The lyric is M. Shadows’, and the track — The Rev’s savage drumming included — is a good indication of the metal-punk fusion the band were working in at the time.
"The Wicked End", on City of Evil, is another song drawn from the Book of Revelation. M. Shadows is not religious, but he has repeatedly used biblical stories as material — "Chapter Four" on the previous album, Waking the Fallen, being an earlier example.
The self-titled album of 2007 was the last the band released with The Rev in the line-up. He sings on several of its tracks, "Scream" among them. The scream that opens it belongs to Valary DiBenedetto, M. Shadows’ girlfriend at the time; they married in 2009.
The Warner litigation ended with the band going back to the label. M. Shadows says what they had actually wanted was their masters, and the seven-year clause was the lever. Once the people at Warner who had not cared about the band were gone and new staff flew out to talk, they agreed that the album made for Capitol would stand and the band would return to finish their deal. He also believes they may be the only band to have actually released a record while still in litigation over that clause.
M. Shadows describes "Afterlife" as a song about looking at a reflection of yourself. It uses the metaphor of falling into the afterlife and arguing with the gods, then realising you left too early and never did what you needed to do — never made things right with your father, never told the people you love that you loved them. What it comes down to, he says, is living in the moment and being who you want to be before it is too late.
What "Critical Acclaim" attacks is people who point fingers at soldiers in a war. M. Shadows had close friends who served in Iraq and wanted to stand with them. He has called it an angry track rather than a political one: the people who do not make the decisions could be quiet for a minute, because their complaining is not helping, and the world could be made a more positive place instead.
"Creating God" is about how far computers have come. M. Shadows told Rolling Stone that they keep getting smarter, until all of a sudden they become your god — so much more intelligent than you that you look like apes to them, or ants. Of all the songs on an album built around artificial intelligence, it is the one whose title says it outright.
Asked in 2013 what he could not tour without, M. Shadows named three things. His son, born the previous year, whom he intended to bring along because being apart from him was unthinkable. Coffee. And sleep and hydration — on the road he talks as little as possible and does no interviews. Sleep, water, and keeping his mouth shut: a practical regimen for protecting a voice.
What M. Shadows worked at on Hail to the King was not layering his voice. He wanted the vocals to be powerful to match the new style of song, and the way he found to do it was to sing single tracks rather than stack them. One voice, he discovered for the first time, sounds larger than several.