In a recent interview with Igor Miranda of Rolling Stone Brasil, AVENGED SEVENFOLD singer M. Shadows once again discussed the experimental nature of the band’s latest album, “Life Is But A Dream…” Written and recorded over the span of four years, it was produced by Joe Barresi and AVENGED SEVENFOLD in Los Angeles and mixed by Andy Wallace in the Poconos, Pennsylvania. The album is a journey through an existential crisis; a very personal exploration into the meaning, purpose and value of human existence with the anxiety of death always looming. Reflecting on the mixed response to the album, which has included a fair proportion of negative reactions, M. Shadows said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I don’t think any of that stuff weighs on me at all. I think it weighs on other people more than it weighs on the band. But I think it’s healthy for us to be kind of oblivious to it, because when we wrote that record… Every one of our records, I think, served a really cool purpose at the time. I definitely think it’s funny. There’s those moments where you go… We were playing in Greece, and I think there was, like, 10 or 12,000 people [there], and I’m looking at these faces and I’m thinking, I just wonder what those people thought the first time they put on ‘Life Is But A Dream…’ It’s kind of funny to me. I get more of a kick out of it than anything. ‘Cause we totally back it. We love it. We think it’s great.”
He continued: “I think those people can either go on a journey and learn to like it, or they loved it off the bat, or they’ll never put it on again. But the idea that we have some sort of control over our art and we can put it out there and we can like affect people in that way, it’s just kind of funny to me. It can’t be that serious, right? Like if someone makes a painting and you’re, like, ‘Oh, I don’t like that, but I like that.’ The artists should do what they wanna do. We don’t let it weigh on us as much as it probably weighs on other people.”
Asked what keeps him and his AVENGED SEVENFOLD bandmates motivated to not repeat themselves musically and to constantly challenge their fans with their new music, M. Shadows said: “I’ve been really interested lately in the usage of unique melody, and when you’ve got unique melody, a super square riff… And then so when we start thinking about music going forward, and it even started with ‘The Stage’ and with ‘Life Is But A Dream…’, we’re really playing around tonally with things that really interest us and kind of bend our ear and make us feel something. And so if you can keep chasing something and making you feel something, the thing you already did isn’t gonna make you feel super different, ’cause you’ve already done it. And if you’re playing in those modes a lot and you’re playing riffs in 4/4 and you’re kind of doing transitions the way you used to do it, you’re gonna sit there with your buddies when you’re writing music and you’re not gonna feel anything, because you’ve done it a million times. And so whenever we venture into something that’s very unique, tonally or riff-wise or the way we can arrange something and we get excited, then we go, ‘Okay, now we’ve got something to kind of go off of. Let’s keep chasing that feeling and then we’ll put it out.’ That’s what keeps us going. It’s that chase of, like, ‘How can I make myself feel a feeling that I’ve never felt or that feels really crazy or really good or really unique?’ And I guess that’s the only way I can put it. And I don’t know how to get there other than to keep pushing the limits outside of what I’m comfortable with. So that’s what keeps us inspired — just finding new things to make us feel weird.”
M. Shadows previously talked about the mixed response to “Life Is But A Dream…” during a June 2023 interview with the “Let There Be Talk” podcast. He said at the time: “With our new record right now, all you see are 10-out-of-10 reviews and zero-out-of-10 reviews. But it’s the best way to be because the people that hate it absolutely hate it. It’s one of those things where, in 2023, having a zero out of 10 is actually better than anything you could ask for, because people are talking, and it’s a weird society we live in at this point.”
“All artists can do is be a reflection of themselves at any point in time,” he continued. “There’s nothing worse than when people are trying to put you in a box and want you to write the same music you wrote when you were in high school or 20 years old. Those were reflections of who we were back then; we were aggressive, young kids that were just kind of all over the place making a certain type of music. And every record kind of changed. But this one in particular — much more musical in terms of not having to have one foot fully in metal. It’s got so many different eclectic influences that we’ve had our whole life that we never really were able to kind of quantify. Like if you think about THE RESIDENTS or MR. BUNGLE, all these different things that we were growing up listening to. And I think is just where we’re at right now. It’s a different type of record. The philosophy, all of it, is different, and so it’s not gonna appeal to people that want the same thing or more of the same or they’re there in their life right now. It doesn’t mean they’re not gonna get here. Maybe they’re just not here right now. Maybe it’s our job to put our arm around them and say, ‘Hey, we’re up the street at this bar. And let’s hang out here. This is what we’re doing now.’
“There are so many psychological things that go into if people like records or not or if they don’t or what they’re listening to at the time. And it’s not really our job to figure that out; it’s just our job to put something out that we totally back and we appreciate. And we’ll see where it goes. It’s hard to really talk about it, ’cause there’s really no right or wrong answer. It’s okay to hate this record.”
The now-44-year-old Shadows, whose real name is Matt Sanders, went on to cite a few other examples where certain records represented a departure from the sound and direction that fans expected their favorite artists to go.
“There’s a few records I think of, for my era and my age, when they came out. One is ‘Pinkerton’ by WEEZER,” he said. “They blew up with the ‘Blue’ album, and then they put out ‘Pinkerton’, which is why one of my favorite records of all time — it’s dirty, it’s lyrically uncomfortable, it’s all these things. That’s one. And then ‘Disco Volante’ is one from MR. BUNGLE. MR. BUNGLE was already weird with the self-titled [album], but ‘Disco Volante’ was just, like… Mike Patton is not even singing; he’s just making noises the whole time. It’s like them messing around with keyboards. It blows my mind. ‘Yeezus’ is one for me with Kanye [West]. He put out pretty much a heavy metal record. Everyone in hip-hop hated it, and now it’s one of his essential records. But there’s always those things that kind of stand outside the box and outside the norm and they ruffle feathers and people have knee-jerk reactions. And I think this is definitely one of those. But you’ve gotta make sure that it’s backed up with musicality. It’s gotta be backed up with some depth. It can’t just be weird for weird’s sake. And I think that’s a lot of people’s go-to on this: ‘I hate it because they’re just trying to be weird.’ It’s, like, no, actually, we’re not. ‘They’re trying to be prog.’ It’s, like, prog is the last thing on our minds. We don’t care about that. All we care about it writing shit that feels cool.
“People overthink it and they try to even put these things in boxes,” Shadows added. “And I think prog has even become its own box, which sucks, ’cause prog should be so many different directions. Why does prog have rules? The world is funny. People like to put things in a box so they can kind of discuss it better, I guess. But this record is kind of boxless, I guess.”
M. Shadows previously discussed AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s songwriting approach on “Life Is But A Dream…” earlier in June 2023 in an interview with Lou Brutus of HardDrive Radio. At the time, he said: “We were just looking for really bold moments — in life, in art, in film. Things that we could sort of wrap our minds around an audio representation of how we were feeling about certain things.
“At this point, playing around with melody, playing around with tones, playing around with left turns, curveballs was really appealing to us.
“I think we’ve proven to everyone, whether they like the band or not, that we kind of know the rules of music, and this record, we were able to just go break all the rules,” he continued.
“Mike Shinoda [of LINKIN PARK] put it to me really perfectly — I love his insight on a lot of things — and he said, ‘This record is like you guys throwing paint at the wall, but if a fourth-grader was doing it, you’d say that’s just paint on the wall. But because of everything you’ve done before, we all know you know how to make a beautiful painting, so this record is actually really special because it’s not just paint on the wall. You guys have broken all the rules and done things in an abstract way. But we wanna listen and pay attention because we know what you guys have done before.’ And I thought it was an interesting way of putting it, ’cause those [LINKIN PARK] guys — Dave [‘Phoenix’ Farrell] and Mike — have been big fans of this record. And I think that was a cool way of putting it.”
M. Shadows added: “We kind of just really wanted to push the boundaries — the musical boundaries, the lyrical boundaries, the themes — and we didn’t want anything on the record to sound generic or phoned in or not exciting. We wanted to redo everything we’ve ever done, where even the song lengths and the way we kind of put these little pieces of ear candy, but we get away from it quick. Or staying away from three choruses, or if there is three choruses, they’re all vastly different. And really thinking about turning the traditional landscape of how you would normally put a song together on its head, but do it in an interesting way — not just to do it, but just to do it in a way that we think people will enjoy and give them sort of a reason to get to the end of songs or get to the next song on the record. And I think that was just a mindset this time, was just a little different — really looking at those things.”
“Life Is But A Dream…” reportedly sold 36,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 13 on the Billboard 200 chart. AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s previous LP, “The Stage”, debuted at No. 4 on The Billboard 200 album chart in November 2016. The surprise release of “The Stage” earned the lowest sales of an AVENGED SEVENFOLD album in eleven years. It sold 76,000 copies in its first week, less than half the tally of its previous two efforts.
Last month, AVENGED SEVENFOLD postponed its fall 2025 Latin American tour due to M. Shadows’s vocal injury. The band was scheduled to to kick off the tour on September 25 in Buenos Aires, Argentina but ended up calling off the trek after M. Shadows was diagnosed with vocal fold hematoma, a condition where a blood vessel in the vocal cord ruptures and leaks blood under the lining of the vocal cord.