Here’s Avenged Sevenfold’s Video for “Hail to the King”

Kind of amazingly in this day and age, when bands will routinely release three or four songs before they eventually do a full-album stream before the album is actually released, Avenged Sevenfold have still only unveiled one song from their forthcoming Hail to the King: the title track. Which is a good song, but doesn’t exactly knock my aviator sunglasses off, y’know? It’s weird, but the album is coming out in a week-and-a-half and I pretty much have no idea what it sounds like other than “Avenged Sevenfold,” which is pretty vague in a post-“Brompton Cocktail,” post-“A Little Piece of Heaven,” post-“Fiction” world.

So there’s a weird, anti-climactic feel to A7X’s video for “Hail.” I mean, it’s a perfectly good video — basically it’s like a riff on Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” clip, Metallica’s original “Unforgiven” clip, and maybe Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal as reimagined by Zack Snyder, all of which seems about right for this group. It’s just that, MAN, are they putting a lot of faith in this first single. Either they think it’s that good, or they’re like “Eh, we’re Avenged Sevenfold, we’re gonna sell a shitload of records* anyway.”

Avenged Sevenfold’s Hail to the King comes out August 27. The band goes on tour with Ghost and the Deftones in October; get dates here.

*Not adjusted for deflation.