AVENGED SEVENFOLD's M. SHADOWS: We Want To 'Explore The World' And 'Do Some New, Unique Things' On Current Tour

During an appearance on the latest episode of AVENGED SEVENFOLD's "TRAX Podcast", singer M. Shadows was asked if there is still a lot of touring to be done in support of the band's latest album, 2023's "Life Is But A Dream…" He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Yeah, there is. We even just had a call today of some very unique things we wanna do. We're trying to make not only the way that the music is released, but the type of music, the type of festivals, the type of places we play, the type of merch, every single thing we want to kind of live in this world where it all feels unique. So we have finished up the part of our cycle where we've kind of checked some boxes, but we do have to go to Europe. So I know everyone will go, 'Oh, you didn't go to Europe yet,' but we're gonna try to do some things and open up some markets and do some things that we've never done and not many bands have done. To us, it's about exploring the world and kind of doing some new, unique things, and we think 'Life Is But A Dream…' is the perfect record to do it."

Regarding AVENGED SEVENFOLD's recent concert in Jakarta, Indonesia, M. Shadows said: "We took a swing at that one and we said, 'If you look at Spotify [statistics], we should be able to do a stadium there.' So we threw a stadium on sale and it sold out. And that is incredible to us, that things are still growing at this part of our career. And you mentioned India, and India is a market we're looking at going. There's a billion people there. Why aren't more bands going? Well, the reason more bands don't go is finding promoters, finding something that seems secure, something that can be trusted, getting there, obviously bringing a whole crew over there. But these are the things we're looking at now. We think that rock bands and metal bands should be going to India more, the same way that South America and Southeast Asia, 15, 20 years ago, were not viable markets. Now they are hotbeds for our type of music. And so I think going there and putting in some work and doing more Eastern Europe, maybe even dipping our toes into Africa, and then looking at India, are the kind of things that are really on our sort of wish list."

AVENGED SEVENFOLD performed "Dear God", a song from the band's self-titled fourth album, live for the first time in 15 years during the May 25 concert in Jakarta. Speaking to Medcom.id, M. Shadows stated about the decision to play the track: "Well, Indonesia is very far away. And the fact that there's such a big community of AVENGED SEVENFOLD fans here is pretty special to us. We also know that 'Dear God', for some reason, really struck a chord here and people seem to enjoy it. I know they listened to it in their Internet cafés in the early 2000s. And there was a time when we sort of didn't wanna accept that, and when we came here, we didn't play it a couple of times. But now we think it's become something larger than us almost, and so we're really excited to play it for the first time in 15 years."

AVENGED SEVENFOLD launched the 2024 leg of the "Life Is But A Dream…" North American tour on March 6 at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York. The band's 2024 run included AVENGED SEVENFOLD's first-ever performances in Manchester, New Hampshire; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Newark. The group performed in Des Moines, Iowa for the first time in 18 years; Cleveland, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the first time in 15 years.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD has been touring in support of "Life Is But A Dream…", which sold 36,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 13 on the Billboard 200 chart.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD made its first festival appearance in five years on May 19, 2023 at Welcome To Rockville at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD's first concert since June 2018 took place on May 12, 2023 at AREA15 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

To date, AVENGED SEVENFOLD has sold over 10 million albums worldwide and earned two consecutive No. 1 albums on Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart (2010's "Nightmare" and 2013's "Hail To The King") to go along with over a billion video views and a billion-plus Spotify streams, as well as multiple No. 1 singles on rock radio.