AVENGED SEVENFOLD's M. SHADOWS Believes 'The Stage' Has Become 'The Crown Jewel' In The Band's Catalog A Decade After Its Surprise Release

In a new interview celebrating the tenth anniversary of AVENGED SEVENFOLD's "The Stage" album, frontman M. Shadows spoke to Ryan J. Downey about the way the LP was marketed. The surprise release of the disc, which was announced the night it went on sale a decade ago, earned the lowest sales of an AVENGED SEVENFOLD album in eleven years. It sold seventy-six thousand copies in its first week, seventy-three thousand of which were physical.

Addressing AVENGED SEVENFOLD's decision to secretly release "The Stage", M. Shadows said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I think we continually do this where we do something a little too early, where we always wanna be first to do things that excite us. So the positive is that we're always artistically satisfied, 'cause we're getting to do things that get us up in the morning and really pump us up."

Referencing the fact that AVENGED SEVENFOLD played a surprise four-song rooftop concert on October 27, 2016 atop the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood, California to surprise release "The Stage", M. Shadows continued: "If you put us in a room with a bunch of label executives, we're convincing enough that we can get what we want. So we got in on a call with [our record label], and they were a little skeptical, but they got excited too. And the only compromise was, again, we were gonna be way early to the party. We were gonna do it digital only. And they told us they didn't feel comfortable with that, but they would promise us that they would make CDs and get them to stores, but label them something different, so that no one would know. And so they were able to fulfill all the things that they needed to fulfill, and we got our surprise release. And so we said, 'Well, we gotta figure out a way to let the world know,' which was the Capitol Records on the top of the building. So it was very exciting."

Reflecting on the fact that "The Stage" was not only made available without any real advance promotion, but it also turned out to be the most ambitious AVENGED album yet — a deeply complex concept effort about the evolution of artificial intelligence and its possible consequences (both positive and negative) upon our society — M. Shadows said: "So here's the things I learned. At the time, and it's even worse now — the Internet moves fast. If there's no long, drawn out campaign, it simply misses a large portion of people. Because if it doesn't show up on your feed, and if it doesn't show up within that first, like, week, people are on to something else… And it's one of those things where even the state of our politics and the state of the world has made it to where something egregious can happen, and two days later you're on to the next egregious thing. And that's the same with... You'll see scandals in music. You'll see festivals that don't happen. You'll see all these sorts of things happen, and regardless if it's good or bad, it's forgotten about in two to three days. And at that time, things were forgotten about in about a week, two weeks [tops]. So what we didn't plan for was that. We thought the record would just grow. We thought radio would get behind it. We just had 'Hail To The King', our biggest radio single ever, and now we're rolling into this thing. We're gonna hand it to them. They're gonna play it 'cause 'The Stage' rules, all these things, and none of that stuff panned out. Radio said they want nothing to do with it 'cause there is no buildup, and 'we feel shafted by you guys. You didn't let us know.' You've got a record label who's got all these things in the stores, but no way to get people to know about it because the news cycle's already turning over. And so then they lose steam really quickly. Because now we're not seeing any sort of return on this cool thing you did."

He continued: "And so those are the negatives of it. The positives of it is that it has significantly grown as lore within our catalog. If you liked 'The Stage' in the beginning, you were on the outside. Now if you don't like 'The Stage', people don't listen to your opinion. Like, 'Oh, you haven't... You either haven't listened or you don't get it.' And so it's turned into this thing where the fans love 'The Stage' now, but it never had that sort of mainstream thing. And so at that point, now you've got three or four years since 'Hail To The King', and then the band is just not seen in the mainstream for another 10 years. There's just no word of us from 'Hail To The King' all the way till 'Life Is But A Dream…'. And 'The Stage' — but what it did is it really made something really cool happen, which is… You can't really quantify it. It's just something you feel. And there's an aura around that record that's just super special now. So there's positives and then there's negatives in terms of mainstream sort of drive through a wall… It's dense, and when it clicks for people, that thing becomes like the crown jewel in the catalog. And if it doesn't, it's the record you don't wanna put on 'cause it's just too much to get into. That's what I've seen. It's, like, 'Eh.' The first song's nine minutes… It's, like, the thing just is dense. But once it clicks, you're, like, 'Oh, this is my favorite one.' And so it's cool to have that in the catalog, especially since we survived it all. It's not like the band's doing worse because of that. It's just a part of the lineage of the band, and it's a cool thing."

"The Stage", AVENGED's debut for Capitol, sold less than half as many copies in its first week as the group's two previous efforts, 2010's "Nightmare" and 2013's "Hail To The King".

The group made the album available at midnight on October 27, 2016 with almost no promotion beforehand, save for the arrival of a new song one week earlier.

In October 2017, M. Shadows admitted in an interview that the band "definitely dropped the ball in terms of the casual fan" when it came to the marketing of "The Stage". Shadows told ABC Radio: "Do I think it was a good strategy for the casual fan? No, it was horrible for the casual fan. Most casual fans don't even know about it, or they've written it off as… 'Why would you release a record secretly? It must not be good.' And we weren't expecting that at all."

Shadows told The Pulse Of Radio that the band did the surprise release partially out of a desire to let fans hear it and form their own opinions. "It's almost like the jury has already, you know, decided if they like a record or not before it even comes out, because there's so many reviews and opinions," he said. "And we just wanted people to hear it for themselves and make their own opinions."

The deluxe version of "The Stage" arrived in December 2017. This edition featured seven additional studio songs plus four previously unreleased live tracks recorded during the band's shows at The O2 arena in London. Among the seven bonus tracks was the band's cover of the PINK FLOYD classic "Wish You Were Here".

Shadows defended "The Stage" in a 2018 issue of Metal Hammer magazine. He said at the time: "I think it will stand the test of time in terms of AVENGED's legacy and I think that at some point it will be a lot of people's favorite record. I just think that when you're in the middle of the process of writing a record and you know that things are going to be a little complex or a little over people's heads, then you've got to know that a backlash is coming. And it did. But you know that going into it. I just wish that we didn't do so many crazy things at once."

He continued: "I feel that all of the initial backlashes that we've had, people have grown into it. They try it on and see how it fits. The backlash to 'City Of Evil' was insane — and then the next one was insane because it wasn't 'City Of Evil'. The next one was actually fine because Jimmy ['The Rev' Sullivan, drums] had died. We didn't get much of a backlash because I think that people felt bad for us. But then when 'Hail To The King' came out, there was a huge backlash. The different thing on the backlash with 'The Stage', though, was it was the first time that we had a great critical response and more of a fan backlash."

This past May, AVENGED SEVENFOLD announced that it was now "a fully independent band" after completing its deal with Warner with the arrival of the "Life Is But A Dream…" album, which came out in June 2023. The band has also secured the rights to "The Stage", which was originally made available through Capitol.

Warner sued AVENGED SEVENFOLD in late 2015 after the band left the label by citing the California Labor Code's "seven-year rule." The rule allows for parties to exit contracts after seven years if certain unfavorable conditions exist. The band then moved on to Capitol for "The Stage" before returning to Warner for "Life Is But A Dream…".