Six months before the release of Hail to the King, M. Shadows told Metal Hammer that Avenged Sevenfold‘s new album would have more of a classic rock feel.
“The new album has a lot more of a Sabbath and Zeppelin feel to it,” said the vocalist. “We’re going back to Sabbath stuff. We’re looking at blues chords they’re playing most of their stuff in. We’re listening to Zeppelin. We’re going backwards with what we want this record to feel like. I wanna write a classic metal record, a classic rock record in 2013.”
It appeared that the Huntington Beach quintet were beginning a brand new chapter. In some part, their previous album Nightmare helped the four surviving members of the band process the grief of losing their drummer James ‘The Rev’ Sullivan. But with drummer Arin Ilejay on board, the band were ready to start afresh and explore new musical territory.
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“The first show we played without The Rev was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my entire life,” Gates told Metal Hammer. “When we walked onstage we could barely even play our instruments because we were shaking so badly. But we saw our fans and they were so supportive and in that moment we knew that we had an entirely new life for Avenged Sevenfold. We knew then that we had served a greater purpose, and that our time definitely hadn’t run out.”
And sure enough, the song Hail to the King was released five weeks ahead of the album and signposted their new musical direction.
“It’s definitely a song that we want to come out to say, ‘OK, buckle your fucking safety belts, this is what we’re doing now…’” said Gates.
“[Hail to the King] was a response to the fact that we were a big band, but everywhere we went none of our songs could be played anywhere, like in a bar,” Shadows told YouTuber Bradley Hall. “We have nothing that lives up to AC/DC or Metallica’s Black Album or all these records that we love, all of our stuff’s a little too complex, a little too complicated, a little too neoclassical.
“So we started really cutting close to wearing our influences very much on our sleeves in this sort of dumbed-down version of rock music,” he continued, “and that’s not a shot on those bands because they do it brilliantly, they do it better than us, but we wanted to try our hand at doing some things like that. It’s very unnatural for us. It’s not what we do.”
All of our stuff’s a little too complex, a little too complicated, a little too neoclassical.
M. Shadows
Following the release of the single, the album topped the UK Albums Chart, debuted at number 2 in Finland, number 5 in Germany and went in at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart.
Despite its huge popularity, Shadows took to Twitter almost a decade after its release to say some fans were not exactly enamoured with their back-to-basics approach.
“‘Hail to the King’ (the song) streams more than double any other track we have weekly,” he tweeted. “The album is on track to out-sell all the others… yet a portion of the fan base acts like it was a failure by all accounts.”
Some 13 years after its release, the album’s title track remains the band’s most popular song on Spotify with 819.8 million streams to date. The album in total has amassed 1.56 billion plays.
Not band for something the singer once described as a “funny little experiment.”