Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with NME, Avenged Sevenfold guitarist Zacky Vengeance confirmed that the band will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of “City Of Evil” and the 15th anniversary of “Nightmare” in 2025. However, it is still unclear how the group are planning to honor the records.

Vengeance said the following when asked if the band are planning to commemorate the upcoming anniversaries:

“Absolutely. I think those albums are really monumental and fans have grown with them. They’ve meant a certain thing to people at a certain place in their life, so I think it’s important that we do something.

I never want to be a nostalgia act. I’ve always wanted to be as proud of whatever we put out today as I was when we put out those albums, but I’m totally cool with celebrating those albums because it was such a great place and time. Plus it’s actually fun to relive and play those songs and get those reactions. To bank our entire career off past successes, we can’t do it, but we’ll definitely do something to celebrate those albums though. For us, the most exciting thing about looking back is recalling where our heads were at when we were young and writing them. Remembering that they’re part of who we are.”

He also added the following when asked if he sees the albums differently now:

“Absolutely. Because as a humans, we grow and have so much life experience between here and when we wrote those albums. We had no idea what we were doing or how to achieve that vision we had. We just threw everything that we had at it and wanted to be the craziest thing that a major label had ever signed. It was literally ‘Well, let’s take every influence that we’ve ever had, write some long crazy songs, do as many solos as we can and put in as many lyrics as we can’. And people dug it!

So it’s kind of funny, looking back, we can still appreciate it but it’s also like ‘What were we thinking?’ I hope we can do the same in a few years when we look back at ‘Life Is But a Dream…’.”