Five years in the making, the unexpectedly ‘out there’ album Life Is But A Dream…, with all its disparate influences, is going to challenge many people’s idea of what metal music can be.
Earlier this year, powered by existentialism and hallucinogens, Avenged Sevenfold crafted the weirdest album by a major heavy metal band in decades.
Frontman MShadows and his wife, Valary, were having a night out at a local bar when the psychedelic mushrooms began to take hold. Anew Avenged Sevenfold album was already in the works, but the singer wasn’t seeking chemically enhanced inspiration at that moment – until the feelings of love and happiness got intense.
“Then we got home,” Shadows recalls, “and we just had this connection, being so sure that we had travelled through space and time to be together in every life that we meet up in – the ultimate love story.”
From that experience, Shadows wrote the lyrics to Cosmic, a sweeping ballad with influences ranging from Elton John to Daft Punk and 808s-era Kanye West, and nothing to remind you of metal. It’s also the longest track on 2023’s mind-expanding Avenged Sevenfold album Life Is But ADream…, with a romantic vocal that promises: ‘As we chase through the stars beyond forever, I’ll follow you.’
The music is fuelled by wild experimentation, balancing heavy riffs with textures and ideas taken from other genres and dimensions. It is the band’s magnum opus, an album of miniepics and pocket symphonies, absorbing sweeping moments of pop, prog, jazz, gypsy folk, hip-hop, Daft Punk-style robotics, classical melody, the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’, and even some crooning from the Frank Sinatra school.
Shadows is excited to watch the fallout.
“I want to make an impact. I want to make bold art,” he says of the album. “I think after people get used to it, it won’t be so crazy. And then it’ll be like: ‘Well, what’s next?’ That’s the journey we’re all on.”
That makes Life Is But ADream… both a confrontation and an invitation, as the band seek to change the definition of what an Avenged Sevenfold track is supposed to sound like. This time last year, Shadows posted his top five most-played artists on Apple Music, which might have been a clue to his state of mind: The Commodores, Weezer, Kanye West, Queens Of The Stone Age and Billy Joel. And yet just the other day he had Slayer’s Divine Intervention on repeat in the car, happily feeding off its raw power.
“I consider us a metal band,” he says. “We’re definitely influenced by Slayer and Pantera and Metallica and some quirkier things. We’re just trying to put our own twist on it.”
The first public glimpse of the new album was its debut single, the nearly-six-minute Nobody, which mixes
