Avenged Sevenfold Tricks And Treats Fans With Surprise New Album, ‘The Stage’

Avenged Sevenfold may have given fans and their record labels the best Halloween treat of all, releasing a surprise album, which is entitled The Stage and marks the band’s seventh studio album. The follow up to 2013’s highly successful Hail to the King comes as a gift, without having been teased very much at all. Avenged Sevenfold, currently consisting of band members M Shadows (lead vocalist), Zacky Vengeance (rhythm guitarist), Synyster Gates (lead guitarist), Johnny Christ (bassist), and Brooks Wackerman (drummer), had planned to release The Stage later in December, but instead dropped the album now on a generous whim.

Happy Halloween! Avenged Sevenfold Drops The Stage Two Months Early!

This has been a busy week for Avenged Sevenfold. As Loudwire reports, the band spent Thursday night performing live on the roof of the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, a concert which was streamed as an impressive virtual reality event, giving fans a 360 degree, 3D view of the performance. The concert was brought to a climax with the midnight revelation that The Stage is already available.

The new Avenged Sevenfold album is available at their website in a variety of bundle options, or it can be purchased as a digital download or physical copy through a list of suppliers.

Avenged Sevenfold delivers 71 minutes of new music on The Stage, including the ambitious 16-minute long Exist, a song that features a special appearance from famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The Stage will also be available at pop-up shops in Los Angeles and New York City. The stores will sell a wide collection of Avenged Sevenfold merchandise in addition to the albums.

The Los Angeles store is located at 6615 Hollywood Boulevard and will be open from Friday through Sunday from 11:00 a.m. through 8:00 p.m. The New York City location is located at 68 Greene Street and is to have slightly different hours of operation.

The New York Avenged Sevenfold store will open at 11:00 a.m. on Friday through 9:00 p.m. On Saturday and Sunday, the shop will operate from 11:00 a.m. through 8:00 p.m.

Avenged Sevenfold Sets Up The Theme And The Scope Of The Stage

Speaking for Avenged Sevenfold, the band’s frontman, M. Shadows, told Rolling Stone that there’s a reason The Stage far exceeds Hail to the King in regards to the album’s running time and content. Shadows explains that the members of Avenged Sevenfold no longer feel compelled to force their creativity in order to keep pumping out albums. Instead, the band remained patient and waited for genuine inspiration. M. Shadows says taking that new approach may have resulted in a longer wait, but it also allowed them to create a collection of songs that were created out of a real love for their music.

The Stage has a theme. Much of the new Avenged Sevenfold album explores the topic of artificial intelligence and Shadows reveals that comes from his own interest in the subject, particularly because he feels that technology is moving into an area where a greater care for responsibility and ethical considerations will be needed.

“I felt like this is one of those things that our generation is going to have to answer for, eventually, and I just wanted to educate myself on it,” says the Avenged Sevenfold lead singer. “The more I read about, the deeper down this rabbit hole I got, I thought, ‘You know what? I really want to talk about this!’ It’s something that’s going to be an issue in the future, for our kids and our kids’ kids; and if we have a voice that can be screamed from the top of a mountain, I wanted this to be one of those things where we can maybe educate our fans a little bit – or maybe inspire them to educate themselves.”

M. Shadows says the key to getting the rest of Avenged Sevenfold on board with The Stage’s theme was by presenting without adding too much controversy. The subject of AI technology already has enough of that, so Shadows explained his interest to the other Avenged Sevenfold bandmates and followed that up by providing them with some of the same research he had read.

“I talked to the other guys [in the band], and we all started talking and thinking about these big questions,” adds the Avenged Sevenfold singer. “We were like, ‘Man, this is the record! We’re going to put out a piece of art, and it has to be about this, because this is really speaking to us right now!'”

[Featured Image by Ethan Miller/Getty Images]