Avenged Sevenfold guitarist Zacky Vengeance recently discussed the band’s latest album ‘Life Is But A Dream…’ and its atmosphere. During a recent interview with Blackcraft, the guitarist spoke about the band’s success and dreams and he made it clear that the band doesn’t aim to be the next Metallica.
The rocker shared his experience with writing the latest album and how they expected to see a change in the band’s career and success:
“Having the time off gave us a chance to look at ourselves and really reflect. You get to that point in life when your life changes. We have families now, we have obligations, and the easy road is make the next ‘Hail To The King’ album or do ‘Nightmare Part Two’, go package up with the same bands you’ve always played with, sell the same amount of tickets, get a paycheck, [and] you’ll be comfortable. And that just never really sat well with any of us.”
The guitarist then explained how success and fame reflect on the band and why they don’t do what they do just to fit into the metal music scene:
“And it wasn’t like an internal discussion, like, ‘Hey, what are we gonna do to reinvent ourselves?’ I didn’t fucking care. It was, ‘What are we gonna do to not want to not do this?’ Because I never wanna feel like I’m phoning it in. And I never wanna feel like I’m just putting on the heavy metal vest and trying to grow my hair and trying to fit in in hopes of being the next Metallica. It just doesn’t feel right.”
He went on to explain the initial aim of the band and why they started it in the first place, making it clear that they didn’t care if people didn’t like them:
“We didn’t start the band to do that. We wanted to be insane. We wanted to dress crazy. We wanted to write crazy music. And I think we all collectively, at the same moment, realized you either have to go all in on what you love and be completely fearless, which is what we’ve always lived and died by, and if you try and get pulled into the realm of playing it safe, which so many people do, because it’s easy to do when you have mouths to feed, and go up there and just go through the motions, that’s career suicide.”
He added:
“And we collectively just said, ‘Let’s have fun with this. No matter, do what we want to do. Bounce off each other’s ideas, and let’s be happy as a band, the five of us. And if anybody else likes it, great. If they don’t, fuck it. At least we went down with the ship the way that we should.'”
Similar to fitting in, the guitarist earlier talked about going mainstream, stating that the band haven’t had a song that’s gone mainstream so far and their culture wasn’t a part of it. The band started their career playing in small bars, which eventually led up to playing as headliners, both in festivals and in their own tour. The band clearly stated that they were not looking to get mainstream or try to fit in, which seems likely since according to M. Shadows, people are not clued into the band’s genre and that the genre doesn’t have its hands far enough out.
With the release of ‘Life Is But A Dream…’ Avenged Sevenfold hopes to reach out to more people and get them know to understand their music and genre better.
Below, you can watch the interview.
