Avenged Sevenfold might go the singles route after dropping Life Is But A Dream, according to bassist Johnny Christ. In an interview with Whiplash, Christ said Avenged Sevenfold is more interested in dropping single songs and making them big events rather than go down the traditional path anymore.
"We want this to be a full experience as an album," said Christ. "We don't know if we're gonna do a full album again, to be honest. We might do singles and eventize those later on in our career. At this moment, this is our body of work that we want everyone to get kind of at the same time and experience it from track one to track eleven. And I think that that's what has always been important to us, is the way we release things to the public. And it's not because we're hoity-toity and think we're better than other artists or anything like that. It's just we have a certain way that we communicate with our fans and have [done] for the last 20-plus years.
"And we like to keep that intact and always come up with a new, fun way of releasing it. Just like with our music — we're always challenging ourselves and trying to do new things in our music. Why stop there? Let's think about how we can do something fun in the releases and stuff like that. And I think that's really what came back to the way we released The Stage. We had this grandiose idea that we could do… It might not be accepted right away. But the cool thing was we did what we wanted to do. We dropped a surprise release, which no one had done in our genre at the time, and we got to play on the top of Capitol Records, the iconic rooftop there, and do the first-ever virtual livestream in 2016.
"And at the time I didn't even realize what that would mean. It wasn't until 2020, as we all know, and everything went crazy and everyone went to virtual livestreams that it was able to actually show a little bit more significance that it already had being on the top of Capitol Records and playing a livestream."
The whole "albums are a thing of the past" idea is one that's been floating around in the metal world for a little while now. Most notably from Slipknot percussionist Shawn "Clown" Crahan, who said in a 2022 interview that Slipknot might focus less on full-length albums now that they're out of their contract with Roadrunner.
