What absolute fucking madness is this? Avenged Sevenfold’s last album, 2016’s surprise-dropped The Stage, was a slab of ambitious, prog-tinged modern metal that put clear water between them and their own past, even as it alienated the more dug-in sections of their fanbase.
Many bands would have either thought ‘job done’ and resumed normal service, or bottled it and scurried back to safer musical ground. Not Avenged. Their eighth album goes even further out. It’s a deranged psycho-metal musical with hardcore, hip hop, electronic music and jazz burned into its circuits and liquid LSD running through its veins. Kaleidoscopic, disorientating and fearless, it truly is the sound of a band who have stopped giving a single fuck about what people think of them.
