Avenged Sevenfold: All the world's a stage

First. In the internet age, speed is The Thing. Being the first to comment on a post, reply to a tweet, to have an opinion. It’s a word you can easily tire of. For Avenged Sevenfold, however, it’s a word that peppers many of their sentences - a reclamation of sorts - and one they’re proud of. Repeatedly proud of. ‘The Stage’ is a triumph in many respects. Since the passing of Jimmy ‘The Rev’ Sullivan, the band have been on a journey of grief and finding their feet again through ‘Nightmare’ and ‘Hail To The King’. This is the album where they found them. Tackling artificial intelligence and the breadth of mankind, they’re the first rock band to drop a surprise physical release, the first to do so with a groundbreaking virtual reality gig and they’re (you’d imagine) the first band to get astrophysicist and cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson to wax lyrical about space and humanity on a metal record. But the real question is, why? “For us, something’s been missing in how albums are released nowadays,” explains guitarist Zacky Vengeance. “It’s become so boring and mundane, because when we were growing up, there was a very special, almost magical moment of going into a record store having saved up money. You finally get the album that you want, look at the artwork, check the tracklistings, and decide which album to buy, and then you get to take it home and be the first to decide what you think about it. You get to listen to it in its entirety, and it’s an investment. “Nowadays, you have 500 reviews before an album comes out, everyone’s got an opinion, albums leak a month in advance, bands release four singles, literally almost half of an album before it gets released and then people have already made an opinion before they get it. We wanted to let fans have their own opinion once and for all, just like how we used to growing up, that could give people something special in this day and age.”