At this point, it’s been six years since the last Avenged Sevenfold album. It took some time for 2016’s “The Stage” to grow on us, but it’s now highly respected among the band’s fans. But over the past year or so, we’ve all been hearing some stuff about the follow-up. In February, they shared an update, revealing that the orchestral parts were almost done, ultimately revealing that there were orchestral parts in the first place.
But during a recent visit to The Bob Lefsetz Podcast, Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows shared a brand new status on the new album, including when we can expect it to come out. As he explained, the mixing will happen this August, which puts its release date potentially in late 2022, maybe even later. Asked to share an update on the album, M. Shadows offered (transcript via Ultimate Guitar):
“We recorded an album, you know, a few years ago. We haven’t finished it yet. We kind of took some time off for family, COVID, weird touring circumstances, some changes within our team… And we are still currently with one record left on Warner Brothers Records. We’ll be finishing that record up – I think we have May locked out [for when] our producer can get back to work on it, and then we’re going to mix with Andy Wallace in August.”
“And then we’re going to figure out if it’s the first quarter, or fourth quarter, or what we’re going to do. So, the status is that, and then we’re going to be booking tours, put the tickets on sale when the record comes out, and the whole nine yards.”
During the chat, he also touched upon the band’s whole NFT thing, the Deathbats tokens, with some of their fanbase feeling a bit weirded out about it. But as M. Shadows explains, there’s no need to be worked up about it. As he explains, there are plenty of fans who just care about the music and not the Deathbats, which can come with some advantages to super fans (kind of like a fan club thing). The musician explained:
“My mindset now is that you don’t turn music fans into our collectors. They don’t care. They want the music, they don’t care [if] they own the track on Spotify, they don’t really care. There’s very few people that are gonna care about that ownership.”
