Metal Anarchy

During the latest episode of Avenged Sevenfold‘s “TRAX” series, frontman M. Shadows revealed that psychedelics played a role in the creation of the band’s new album “Life Is But A Dream…” (out June 2). Specifically, the singer says him and guitarist Synyster Gates were taking 5-MeO-DMT.

Shadows said the following:

“Me and [Synyster Gates] were exploring deeply in psychedelics throughout the last few years. One of those things in particular was 5-MeO-DMT. I had a very tough experience in like, you know, type A personality [whose] ego gets completely demolished.

You see yourself leave your body and we can get into that more, but one thing that I came out of that realizing was that life is so short. Don’t put anything out unless it’s bold, and ‘bold’ was the word that we were using. ‘Bold’ was like, don’t just play within your genre.

There’s a huge difference between ‘Waking The Fallen’ and ‘City Of Evil,’ but they were both playing within a genre. Yeah, it was different but it was all within a… there was a sphere there.

On this record, we didn’t want to be a part of any of that. We wanted to just put out art that just… if we saw something or heard a sound, we wanted to figure out how to get that, but not with our normal tools, right? If there was a feeling, we wanted to try to extract that feeling in audio, but not with our normal tool shed.

So when you look at like the guitar tone, or the riff and the guitar tone, for something like ‘Nobody,’ that’s just a droning thing that we had to figure out how to melodically play between major and minor, and to make it interesting.

But the same time we didn’t want to actually make notes with it. We wanted to just have this thing [droning] almost like ‘Terminator 2.’ Then we’re gonna play melodically with it, but it was basically this psychedelic experience that took us into this ‘be bold. Don’t do psychedelics and make Pink Floyd. No, do your own thing and make your own stamp.’”

[via Metal Injection]