Good news! Avenged Sevenfold is working on their first new album since 2016's The Stage. Though the kickers are that it's not quite done and the band won't release it until full-scale touring is an option again. The latter of which isn't surprising given comments made by the band previously regarding their feelings toward pandemic-era albums.
According to vocalist M. Shadows in an interview with Kerrang!, the writing process for the new record has been pretty casual. Shadows said the band isn't in a rush to get things done, and have been working on the new material for a little while now.
"We've been writing a record for a while, and most of it was already written," he said. "But then we kinda took a break on it, and then it would be like, 'Hey, let's get together two days this week,' instead of five or six. It just started getting more casual. Then we recorded really casually, and — like I said — we're still in the middle of it: we still have all these things that we can't do.
"We're still trying to get string sections together, and our mixer is older and I know that they don't want him to travel right now because of COVID, so even if we got it done right now, we couldn't get it mixed. So we're just not worrying about it, you know? It's like, 'When we can, we can.' But right now, we can't."
Shadows later added that the new record doesn't really sound like anything the band has ever done.
"The record sounds nothing like The Stage — it's a completely new direction, and it sounds nothing like anything we've done. That's all I'll say about it: it's over the top, and it's very eclectic and wild."
