New Avenged Sevenfold Video Offers Up a Nightmare
Debi Moore
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You may have noticed we’ve cut back a bit on our coverage of the music scene, but when the news crossed our desk that the new Avenged Sevenfold video for the band’s latest single, “Nightmare”, is truly horror-themed, we thought we’d pass it along to you guys. Dig it!
Avenged Sevenfold are releasing their fifth studio album, Nightmare, on July 27th, and the video for the title track shows lead singer M. Shadows being strapped down to a gurney and rushed through the halls of a mental asylum where, room by room, he encounters different “nightmares”. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but one of my biggest fears is being trapped in the loony bin so, for this Woman, it’s damned effective!
Sadly, while the members of Avenged Sevenfold were well into working on Nightmare, their lives changed forever. Jimmy Sullivan, aka the Rev, had died. They hadn’t just lost their drummer. They’d lost a family member – a guy who was best friends with vocalist M. Shadows since second grade in the Orange County town of Huntington Beach and with guitarist Synyster Gates since fifth grade.
Continuing work on the album seemed impossible, unimportant for Shadows, guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance, and bassist Johnny Christ. “We were going to see if we could write another song or two,” says Shadows of the days following the Rev’s death, “and we couldn’t. We weren’t in the mood for it. Sitting there trying to figure out chord progressions and guitar parts felt ridiculous.” But soon the band realized that it was impossible for them not to continue, that it would be almost a betrayal of the Rev’s legacy and their love for him. He’d played an integral role in writing and crafting the tracks that had been demoed for the album. And just days before he died, he’d completed his ultimate accomplishment, baring his raw emotions in the song “Fiction” that now seemed to have foretold his own death and assured his friends in no uncertain terms that they had to carry on.
Most of the lyrics were rewritten, drummer Mike Portnoy (of the band Dream Theatre) was brought in to do the Rev’s in-theory inimitable parts; producer Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Eminem, Regina Spektor) stayed on to help everyone rise to the now-transcendent occasion. “Nightmare” (the first single), “Welcome To The Family,” “Buried Alive,” “God Hates Us,” “Victims,” the closing epic “Save Me” – songs completed before and after the tragedy – all plumbed new depths of emotion and meaning. Gates was moved to write lyrics for the first time, laying bare his grief on “So Far Away.” And Nightmare truly became the album of their lives, the album literally of the Rev’s life and an achievement for the ages documenting the most intense, personal experience these people could imagine.
Nightmare marks the beginning of a new era for Avenged Sevenfold, though just what that will be cannot be predicted.
“That’s an unknown,” says Christ. “I can’t tell you what I’m going to feel like tomorrow. We want to get this out and tour, and then we’ll try our very best to push on and do what we do and continue the legacy. The goal from day one, when we said we were going to do this album, was that we weren’t going to half-ass it. It is Jimmy’s record and the fans will love it. And we want everyone to understand what was going on in the process.”
Order your copy of Nightmare from the EvilShop below, get the deluxe edition from iTunes, or buy the limited edition “Book of Nightmares” from the official Avenged Sevenfold website that includes the CD, a booklet featuring lyric sheets and exclusive artwork, a 24″ by 36″ lithograph entitled “Death Bat Anatomy”, and more, all housed in a synthetic leather-bound book with special silver-plated “Nightmare” crest. Click here for the full list of upcoming Avenged Sevenfold tour dates in the US, Canada, and the UK.
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