Avenged Sevenfold May Be Done With Full-Length Albums
After trying out all manner of promotional techniques for their new album, Life Is But a Dream…, Avenged Sevenfold may be ready to pursue other avenues of releasing music as opposed to full-length records. While speaking about The Stage and its unorthodox surprise release, bassist Johnny Christ also pondered the future of the band and their release style.
“We want this to be a full experience as an album. We don’t know if we’re gonna do a full album again, to be honest. We might do singles and eventize those later on in our career. At this moment, this is our body of work that we want everyone to get kind of at the same time and experience it from track one to track eleven. And I think that that’s what has always been important to us, is the way we release things to the public. And it’s not because we’re hoity-toity and think we’re better than other artists or anything like that. It’s just we have a certain way that we communicate with our fans and have [done] for the last 20-plus years. And we like to keep that intact and always come up with a new, fun way of releasing it. Just like with our music — we’re always challenging ourselves and trying to do new things in our music. Why stop there? Let’s think about how we can do something fun in the releases and stuff like that. And I think that’s really what came back to the way we released ‘The Stage’. We had this grandiose idea that we could do… It might not be accepted right away. But the cool thing was we did what we wanted to do. We dropped a surprise release, which no one had done in our genre at the time, and we got to play on the top of Capitol Records, the iconic rooftop there, and do the first-ever virtual livestream in 2016. And at the time I didn’t even realize what that would mean. It wasn’t until 2020, as we all know, and everything went crazy and everyone went to virtual livestreams that it was able to actually show a little bit more significance that it already had being on the top of Capitol Records and playing a livestream.”
Despite a messy rollout that showcased some of the most-awkward songs on the record, Avenged Sevenfold’s Life Is But a Dream…captured the attention of the internet, so maybe Christ is on to something. Or maybe he just ate too much acid. We’ll see!
