httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBYVlFXsEME
The band’s first album for Capitol Records after over a decade with Warner Bros.
Rolling Stone caught up with Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows in advance of Thursday’s show to discuss The Stage, his fascination with AI, pushing the envelope with their stage show and how they got one of America’s most famous scientists to make a cameo appearance on their record.
Everyone else is dropping the breadcrumbs, having four or five singles before their record comes out.
We really don’t want it to be like, “Two years are up. You’ve had your break; now do another record and get it out t.” We needed to wait until something really inspired us, and that’s why the record took a long time to get done.
Then the second half of the record jumps into space, and space exploration, and how we treat each other as human beings – how we never really look at someone else’s perspective, because we just see our own.
We love Gustav Holst’s The Planets, but no one’s really hit the Big Bang, so we did it! I wanted it to be all instrumental, and then Brian was like, “Well, I think t should be some vocals on it.” So we ended up with a compromise w it’s like, “OK, when the vocals come in, that’s Earth – that’s the first time that life starts after the cooling-down period of the Big Bang.” Originally, we wanted to use a recording of Carl Sagan reading an excerpt from The Pale Blue Dot, but [his estate] isn’t really letting people use that.
It’s rather ironic that an album about artificial intelligence is actually your most “Human” record in over a decade.
Listen to that new Bowie record – it’s a brilliant record, but it’s so fucking out t, and that’s why it’s art! It’s so exciting to us to put out something like that and be completely, 100 percent satisfied with it.