Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows has reflected on the band’s 2016 album “The Stage”, describing it as the crown jewel of their catalogue a decade after its unexpected release.
Originally released on October 28, 2016, through Capitol Records, the band’s seventh studio album marked a significant creative turning point. Its progressive arrangements, ambitious compositions and science-fiction themes represented a departure from the more straightforward heavy metal approach of its predecessor, “Hail To The King”.
Ten years later, Shadows believes the record has earned a particularly important place in Avenged Sevenfold’s history. The album was released without a conventional advance promotional campaign, surprising fans and the music industry alike. The band had deliberately kept its plans secret, hoping to create an experience in which listeners could discover the music without months of singles, teasers and expectations.
I think we continually do this where we do something a little too early, where we always wanna be first to do things that excite us. So the positive is that we’re always artistically satisfied, ’cause we’re getting to do things that get us up in the morning and really pump us up.
M. Shadows went on to mention that on October 27, 2016, Avenged Sevenfold unexpectedly released “The Stage” with a four-song rooftop concert atop the famous Capitol Records building in Hollywood, California.
If you put us in a room with a bunch of label executives, we’re convincing enough that we can get what we want. So we got in on a call with [our record label], and they were a little skeptical, but they got excited too. And the only compromise was, again, we were gonna be way early to the party. We were gonna do it digital only. And they told us they didn’t feel comfortable with that, but they would promise us that they would make CDs and get them to stores, but label them something different, so that no one would know. And so they were able to fulfill all the things that they needed to fulfill, and we got our surprise release. And so we said, ‘Well, we gotta figure out a way to let the world know,’ which was the Capitol Records on the top of the building. So it was very exciting.
M. Shadows stated that “The Stage” was the most ambitious Avenged album to date, a deeply complex concept effort about the evolution of artificial intelligence and its potential effects (both positive and negative) on our society, and that it was released without any real advance promotion.
So here’s the things I learned. At the time, and it’s even worse now — the Internet moves fast. If there’s no long, drawn out campaign, it simply misses a large portion of people. Because if it doesn’t show up on your feed, and if it doesn’t show up within that first, like, week, people are on to something else… And it’s one of those things where even the state of our politics and the state of the world has made it to where something egregious can happen, and two days later you’re on to the next egregious thing. And that’s the same with…
You’ll see scandals in music. You’ll see festivals that don’t happen. You’ll see all these sorts of things happen, and regardless if it’s good or bad, it’s forgotten about in two to three days. And at that time, things were forgotten about in about a week, two weeks [tops]. So what we didn’t plan for was that. We thought the record would just grow. We thought radio would get behind it. We just had ‘Hail To The King’, our biggest radio single ever, and now we’re rolling into this thing. We’re gonna hand it to them. They’re gonna play it ’cause ‘The Stage’ rules, all these things, and none of that stuff panned out.
Radio said they want nothing to do with it ’cause there is no buildup, and ‘we feel shafted by you guys. You didn’t let us know.’ You’ve got a record label who’s got all these things in the stores, but no way to get people to know about it because the news cycle’s already turning over. And so then they lose steam really quickly. Because now we’re not seeing any sort of return on this cool thing you did.”
And so those are the negatives of it. The positives of it is that it has significantly grown as lore within our catalog. If you liked ‘The Stage’ in the beginning, you were on the outside. Now if you don’t like ‘The Stage’, people don’t listen to your opinion. Like, ‘Oh, you haven’t… You either haven’t listened or you don’t get it.’ And so it’s turned into this thing where the fans love ‘The Stage’ now, but it never had that sort of mainstream thing. And so at that point, now you’ve got three or four years since ‘Hail To The King’, and then the band is just not seen in the mainstream for another 10 years. There’s just no word of us from ‘Hail To The King’ all the way till ‘Life Is But A Dream…’.
And ‘The Stage’— but what it did is it really made something really cool happen, which is… You can’t really quantify it. It’s just something you feel. And there’s an aura around that record that’s just super special now. So there’s positives and then there’s negatives in terms of mainstream sort of drive through a wall… It’s dense, and when it clicks for people, that thing becomes like the crown jewel in the catalog.
And if it doesn’t, it’s the record you don’t wanna put on ’cause it’s just too much to get into. That’s what I’ve seen. It’s, like, ‘Eh.’ The first song’s nine minutes… It’s, like, the thing just is dense. But once it clicks, you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is my favorite one.’ And so it’s cool to have that in the catalog, especially since we survived it all. It’s not like the band’s doing worse because of that. It’s just a part of the lineage of the band, and it’s a cool thing.
