AVENGED SEVENFOLD: 'God Damn' Video Preview

AVENGED SEVENFOLD's video for the song "God Damn" will make its online debut on April 26. The clip was filmed in February in the Los Angeles area.

A preview of the "God Damn" video is available below. Also available is behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the clip.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD will join METALLICA for the latter's "WorldWired" 2017 North American tour. Produced by Live Nation, the summer's hottest ticket kicks off May 10 at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland with openers VOLBEAT.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD is touring in support of its seventh album, "The Stage", which was given a surprise release at the end of October with almost no promotion beforehand.

"The Stage" debuted at No. 4 on The Billboard 200 album chart back in November following its surprise release. Co-produced by the band and Joe Barresi, the disc features eleven panoramic tracks tied together by an Artificial Intelligence theme. Inspired by the writings of Carl Sagan and Elon Musk, the album is the band's first thematic release. While the term "AI" conjures up images of robots and fantasy films, the band steers clear of a science fiction storyline. Instead, the album sees them taking a futurist's look at the accelerated rate at which technology's intelligence is expanding and what that means — good and bad — for the future.

The album's epic 15-minute-plus closing track, "Exist", features a guest appearance by award-winning astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson giving a spoken-word performance he penned specifically for the album.

Asked why AVENGED SEVENFOLD decided to release an album with no advance notice, singer M. Shadows told Rolling Stone: "Well, man, a lot of it has to do with boredom. [Laughs] Everyone else is dropping the breadcrumbs, having four or five singles before their record comes out. It completely takes away the mystique of the record; by the time it actually comes out, you've already done 50 interviews about what the record's about and is going to sound like. It's 2016; people's attention spans are so short at this point, who has time for three months of lead-up? You've got five guys over here who are very bored of that; so for us, it was about keeping the hype very short and sweet, and then executing on all levels. Here's the record – we spent a long time on it, and it's available for you now. And now we can all learn about the record together, after you hear it, instead of hearing all these things about it as we're dribbling crumbs at you. We just said, 'No BS this time — we're just going to do everything that we want to do, from the live show to the merchandising, to how we present this thing and how we release it.'"

Regarding how Neil deGrasse Tyson's involvement came about, M. Shadows said: "The song came from the idea of wanting to replicate the Big Bang in a heavy-metal sort of way, like, 'OK, this is what it would have sounded like when this happened!' It's like a huge classical piece. We love Gustav Holst's 'The Planets', but no one's really hit the Big Bang, so we did it! I wanted it to be all instrumental, and then Brian [guitarist Synyster Gates] was like, 'Well, I think there should be some vocals on it.' So we ended up with a compromise where it's like, 'OK, when the vocals come in, that's Earth — that's the first time that life starts after the cooling-down period of the Big Bang.' Originally, we wanted to use a recording of Carl Sagan reading an excerpt from 'The Pale Blue Dot', but [his estate] isn't really letting people use that. So we reached out to Neil."