Avenged Sevenfold released their last album, The Stage, as a complete surprise in late 2016 – with no pre-promo, and the marketing experiment resulted in the band selling half as many copies of The Stage as their previous release, with an even bigger drop in week two. At the time, frontman M. Shadows tried to rationalize the numbers until a few months later when he admitted that the surprise gimmick "wasn't the greatest plan in the world."
Well, hopefully, the band can make up for past marketing mistakes with their next record, which Shadows seems to indicate isn't too far off. In a new interview with ABC Radio, Shadows claims the band could begin working on new material in the fall:
"Maybe October, November we'll start thinking about getting together and just throwing ideas around," the singer said. "We usually don't even write anything the first few weeks, we just kinda talk and show each other things: 'Here's some chords, here's some ideas, what do we want this thing to sound like?' So that's still in the early stages. But it's exciting."
The band is currently in a legal battle with their former label, Warner Music, and in a previous interview with Billboard, Shadows has said he wants the lawsuit resolved before moving ahead with new music:
"We have a couple things we're looking at, but right now we're still dealing with the label situation, we're dealing with the lawsuit still and just — a couple of things that we just got to kind of clean up before we move on to the next record."
Personally, I enjoyed how The Stage had more proggy elements introduced and look forward to hearing what the band does next.
Meanwhile, Avenged will be busy all summer touring the country with Prophets of Rage and Three Days Grace. Get dates here.
