M. Shadows had always been into Call of Duty. But it was when his best friend and Avenged Sevenfold bandmate Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan passed away on December 28 2009, at the age of 28, that he really got into Call of Duty.
"It was something I was able to go do and stay in the house and not be outside and deal with people," he told Rolling Stone. "But I also found a community online where I was able to escape all of the feelings I was having in losing my best friend. So for a couple of years, I just played video games online with my friends."
We all deal with grief in different ways, but being in the middle of making their fifth album, which would eventually become 2010's Nightmare, the need to escape from the constant questioning of what the band were going to do next was an absolute necessity for Shadows.
Gaming had been something that he clung to throughout his whole life. From spending his childhood studying every fatality possible to become a master of Mortal Kombat, an arcade system that he now has installed in his house, to making his way through every adventure Nintendo wanted to throw at Link in the Legend of Zelda series, it has been a solace for as long as he could remember.
The band had also managed to forge its own relationship with gaming in its early days thanks to an initiative put forward by Steve Schnur, who, before joining EA Sports in 2002, was Vice President of A&R at Capitol Records. In wanting to start featuring contemporary bands at sports games, the band sent over their second full-length, Waking The Fallen, which he loved and went on to place Chapter Four in Madden 2004, NHL 2004, and NASCAR Thunder 2004. A key element in putting the band in front of entirely new audiences.
It was this brand of mutual understanding and a desire to dive deeper into connections between different industries, matched with perfect timing, that would later allow Shadows' passion for Call of Duty to reach the next level.
That came from Mark Lamia, studio head at Treyarch, the creators of Black Ops, and more specifically, Call of Duty Zombies. Up until 2011, the company had used composer Kevin Sherwood for their music, developing a fanbase in its own right because of its metal-influenced sound. Though Lamia wanted to take it to a whole new place, a spot where a real-life band could put their stamp on their games. In this case and at this time, that was for Call Of The Dead, the first of the Zombie spin-offs that would become part of the CoD universe. And with a connection to them through the band's A&R and Warner Records, Craig Aaronson, before he knew it, A7X was on his radar.
"I met with Matt, and it became clear that he was very serious about Call of Duty and had a passion for the franchise and loved it and got what we were trying to make," Lamia told Billboard back in 2013 on meeting the band for the first time. "It was one of those meetings where everything came together"
The result of the meetings was Not Ready To Die, an atmospherically creepy, devilishly heavy, undeniably catchy piece of metal ready made for slaughtering the undead. Penned in a four-day gap that the band had between the end of the Nightmare After Christmas tour with Stone Sour and Hollywood Undead that ran through January and Februry and the Welcome To The Family Tour with Three Days Grace, Sevendust, and Bullet For My Valentine which they spent the Spring on, it's a song that pulls directly from the lore of the game. Finding that balance between storytelling and delivering a straight-up banger managed to scratch both itches that Shadows had, and the result speaks volumes for that.
"I think they were excited that we already knew the story and were into it, and we wanted to make it fit with what Avenged Sevenfold does, but make it work with the storyline," he mentioned in an interview in 2011. "It’s not all about us, it’s about making a soundtrack."
