This story was originally published in August 2013.
On a sunny June morning in Huntington Beach, California, Avenged Sevenfold frontman Matt Sanders, a.k.a. M. Shadows, sits contentedly on his living room couch, watching his son, River, work on his golf game. "He's only 11 months old, but he's walking already," he says, beaming with paternal pride as the smiling youngster waves a plastic 3-iron in Revolver's direction. "He's so much fun. All I want to do is hang out with him!"
But there's an interview to be done, so Shadows' wife, Valary, scoops up the little lad and takes him into another room—but not before he manages to steal his daddy's iPhone. "He's going to be so much trouble," Shadows laughs. "All the hell Val and I put our parents through, I just know it's going to come back to us with him."
If it wasn't so genuinely heartwarming, this sweet scene of domesticity might be slightly jarring spectacle, especially for those who still have the image of Avenged Sevenfold circa 2005—hard-rocking, harder-partying hell-raisers coming on like Mötley Crüe via Dr. Hunter S. Thompson—firmly fixed in their frontal lobes. But Shadows, guitarists Brian "Synyster" Gates and Zacky Vengeance, and bassist Johnny Christ have grown up considerably since then, their maturity forcibly fast-tracked by the tragic late-2009 death of founding drummer Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and the emotionally wrenching recording sessions that produced Nightmare, their 2010 tribute to The Rev.
"Yeah, man, we've been through a lot," reflects Vengeance. "We're still pretty immature for our age, but we've overcome some unbelievable shit. I was 17 years old when we started recording our first album [2001's Sounding the Seventh Trumpet]. We're into our thirties now. After Jimmy passed away, we could have hung it up and called it a day, but we fucking powered through it and delivered Nightmare. We earned a lot of respect for that, and it turned out to be our most successful tour."
"It was difficult," says Christ of the Nightmare tour, which began with Dream Theater's former drummer Mike Portnoy (who also played on Nightmare) on the drum stool, and ended with Arin Ilejay (formerly of Confide) filling in for the departed Sullivan. "It was a very small Band-Aid on the wound of losing Jimmy, but getting to see our fans and playing in front of them was good for us. Towards the end of the tour, it started to become fun again. If we weren't having fun at the end of it, we probably wouldn't have gone back to write another record."
Which brings us to Hail to the King, A7X's sixth album, and their first in three years. While the band may be older and somewhat wiser—and the album's title was inspired by a playful moment in which Shadows held his baby son aloft and proclaimed "Hail to the King!"—their music hasn't been softened one iota by newfound maturity or domestic bliss. If anything, Hail to the King is the heaviest Avenged record yet, not to mention the most focused. Whereas the band's back-catalog is filled with songs that typically traverse multiple genres, time signatures, and sonic landscapes in the space of a few minutes, new songs like "Shepherd of Fire," "Doin' Time," "This Means War," and the title cut are as straightforward as a hard right to the jaw. With their progressive chops already well-established, A7X have chosen to channel their power and technical proficiency into 10 tracks that, for the most part, recall the well-honed thrust of Metallica's "Black Album" or Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. "Instead of five songs in one, you get the first five tracks," jokes Gates, but he's right on the money—for the first time in their career, A7X have (mostly) managed to harness their musical A.D.D. and create something that's worthy of standing alongside the classic albums that originally inspired them.
"We grew up on what we feel are great metal records," Shadows explains, "and it kind of dawned on us that a lot of our fans, and a lot of fans of the younger generation in general, didn't have great metal records to grow up on. Most of them love the Warped Tour bands, or whatever the Ozzfest and Mayhem bands are, and they have no clue that, say, Five Finger Death Punch are pulling from Pantera—and no clue that Pantera was pulling from AC/DC. To us, there's a serious musical drop-off after the '90s, so we wanted to do our version of what a '90s-and-before metal record should sound like, but with a 2013 production."
Produced by Mike Elizondo (who also helmed Nightmare), Hail to the King first began to take shape last fall—not in the studio or rehearsal space, but rather at the dinner table. "Ever since the 'White Album' [2007's Avenged Sevenfold], we'll get together and have these dinners where we drink and play certain songs from different records that we think are cool, whether it's Mr. Bungle or Scorpions or Pantera or whatever," says Shadows. "We sit there and talk about it, until we have a vision for what we want our next record to be."
The band's vision for the new album coalesced quickly, with Shadows, Gates, Vengeance, and Christ realizing that they were all on the same page. "We decided, 'We want to make a classic record,'" Gates recalls. "We were listening to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Pantera, the 'Black Album,' and concentrating on what was getting people off about this stuff. Historically, it's been very hard for us to commit to that singular, barbaric-type groove and vibe for an entire album. It was like, 'What are we missing? Oh yeah—the fucking landmark riff!' We love that shit, but we'd never fucking had that 'sing-able riff' in any of our songs."
"Hard to believe we've gotten so far without them," laughs Christ.
"I've always loved big riffs and chunky guitars," adds Vengeance. "I like being able to do dueling leads, and it's fun to be able to shred. But when it comes down to it, hitting an open chord at full fucking volume with high gain has always been what I care about more than all the other shit. Technicality has never meant as much to me as raw fuckin' power. So an album like this for me is a dream come true."
But as anyone who's ever picked apart an AC/DC anthem can tell you, keeping things simple and to the point can be the most challenging thing in the world when penning a hard-rock song. "We'd tried to get there with the self-titled album," Gates admits. "We thought we got there, but we didn't get there. A song like 'Scream' would start off kind of groove-oriented, then go off into fucking punk shit, and then slow down. We were too young and dumb, and we didn't do our homework. I hate to debunk the myth—kids don't wanna hear it—but as songwriters, you have to polish your craft a little bit, and hone it as much as possible. And you can only get that by listening to what other people did, and seeing how certain things evolved: how they used key changes, modulations, all that kind of shit to give it enough uplift, but not so that it interrupts the flow of the song. This time, we were like, 'Let's not half-ass it. When we run into a snag, we're going to have to write through it.'"
"If you look at a lot of older rock, they may be pop-type songs, but they're very intricately constructed—it just seems very seamless," says Shadows. "Maiden, Scorpions, UFO, they all do it. So we really studied that stuff. With this album, it was very deliberate that we were going to use those stepping stones to get what we wanted on each song."
The writing sessions for what would become Hail to the King were grueling affairs that saw the band building one song at a time from the ground up, only to toss it if it failed to completely meet their exacting specifications. "Every riff had to be perfect," Christ insists. "There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week. It was really about making sure that every part was as classic as the last."
"Our natural inclination is to build a song, add more layers, continue building a song and add more layers," says Vengeance. "This time, it was like we had to start with all these grandiose ideas, and pull the layers back and go, 'Look, what's the most powerful thing we can do? Is it having a four-part harmony and being super-melodic? Or is it just having Matt sing his fucking heart out, and repeat what he's saying as powerfully as possible?'"
"It's so easy to sit here and write an album in three months, and go 'It's all good,'" says Shadows. "But in your mind, you know it's a fucking seven out of 10, or even a nine out of 10. The hard part is figuring out what's making that nine not a 10. And if it can't be fixed, it's gotta go. There's no going back and taking parts of it for other songs. It's gone. If it doesn't work, quit wasting your time."
Practically the first thing you notice about Hail to the King, at least once the tolling bells that open "Shepherd of Fire" fade out, is the drums: big, loud, swinging hits that grab you by your throat and pull you along through the music. Gone, for the most part, are the artfully conceived, ultra-complex drum patterns of previous A7X albums, replaced by meaty, in-your-face grooves. There are still wailing leads and dual guitar harmonies aplenty, of course, but it's Ilejay's pounding drums and Christ's ripping bass lines that really give the album its power.
"One of the things we wanted to do was simplify the drums, and overmix them so they were like 'lead drums,'" Shadows explains, "which is something AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and all those older bands had done. Those albums are known for their guitars, but it's the drums that are on top. The drums are driving everything. And if you have someone playing really over-the-top, you can't accomplish that at all."
For Ilejay, this new direction for the band presented something of a drumming conundrum: Having originally been brought onboard because he could handily duplicate all of The Rev's most intricate fills, the young skinsman was now being specifically instructed to not play like The Rev. "Aw dude, it broke the little kid's heart," laughs Gates.
"All during the time we were writing," Shadows says, "we were just throwing records at Arin, saying, 'You have to learn these grooves. You have to understand why this works!' It was all completely new to him. He was used to playing that Mars Volta, Dillinger [Escape Plan], post-hardcore kind of stuff. he'd rather play completely over-the-top, and have all his nuances on the off-beats. We were like, 'No, this is like you're a caveman with two sticks!'"
It wasn't until the band convened at Can-Am Studios to begin recording with Elizondo that Ilejay fully grasped the new groove-oriented approach. "That first day of doing drums, he was still doing a lot of overplaying," Shadows recalls. "I thought we were in trouble: 'Oh no, he's going to keep playing these funky things!' But when he heard his drum tracks played back with the demo guitars, it opened his eyes. All of a sudden, it just clicked. He went, 'Wow, the simplest fill was the best one!' From then on, he was like Mr. Groove."
"Arin couldn't be more stoked about how the record turned out, which is very gratifying to us, because we wanted him to be excited about it," Gates says of the drummer. "He did what Jimmy used to do. Jimmy did it in a bigger, faster, more technical setting, but he's doing what Jimmy did. He's orchestrating—it's a Ringo Starr approach, with all these things that accentuate the song. If you want all the technical, crazy shit, you've got it on a couple of tracks, but for the most part, this is all about groove and orchestration."
For all the band's commitment to becoming a lean, mean groove-rock machine, Hail to the King still has moments that are undeniably, quintessentially Avenged. "Requiem" (which actually opens with Latin choral chanting), "Planets," and "Acid Rain" reflect the band's increasing interest in classical music—Shadows singles out early 20th century composer Gustav Holst as a major influence—and feature orchestrations by renowned conductor David Campbell. The latter two songs, with their apocalyptic imagery, soundtrack-worthy orchestral flourishes, and some of the most emotional vocals Shadows has ever recorded, pair up to close the album in a particularly impressive fashion.
"I really feel that that's what separates us from the rest of the herd," says Gates of "Planets" and "Acid Rain." "Everybody can write a riff, but I don't think a lot of bands can end a record like that. It's the coolest ending of a record that we've ever fucking done, two of my favorite songs that we've ever written—and two of the most different songs that we've ever written."
With Hail to the King finally mixed and mastered, all that remains is for A7X fans to wrap their ears around it. Will they accept and embrace Avenged's new groove-oriented incarnation? The band seems confident that they will.
"Oh, absolutely," enthuses Shadows. "Look at the shift we made from Waking the Fallen to City of Evil. There was nothing fake about that shift, that was just the way we needed to go—and from City of Evil to the 'White Album,' same thing. Nightmare was, I think, closest to what our fans were expecting at that point. And with Jimmy having passed away, they weren't going to sit there and judge it. This is where we naturally needed to go. I feel like we made a killer record, and once people get past the lack of drum fills or whatever, I really feel that people are going to say, 'Wow, this is their landmark record!'"
"We've made some transitions before, but this one is a lot more seamless," adds Gates. "I think we're just gaining elements. It's not like the dueling guitars have gone away, or the solos are shorter. There's still a lot of substance, a lot of depth, and a lot of time was taken to nurture the musicianship of this record. It's definitely a less-progressive record, but there are still some progressive songs—just fast-forward to the end of the record, if you're worried!"
For the guitarist, Hail to the King serves as the final vindication A7X will ever require. "These songs were written with the intention of playing them live," he says, "so it's beyond exciting to think about going out there to play this album on tour.
"There are probably people out there who are stuck in 2006 and think that Avenged Sevenfold are still a bunch of scrawny, makeup-wearing kids," he continues. "They're gonna be standing there at some festival we're playing at, holding a beer, and I want to fucking knock the shit out of them. I want to make them look up and be like, 'Holy shit, this is awesome! Who is this? Avenged Sevenfold? Where did these guys come from?' Ultimately, that's what I want."
