Avenged Sevenfold have shared that they will “definitely do something to celebrate” the 20th and 15th anniversaries of ‘Nightmare’ and ‘City Of Evil’.
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The band’s guitarist Zacky Vengeance spoke to NME about their plans to celebrate the 20th and 15th anniversaries of their two biggest albums – 2005’s ‘City Of Evil’ and 2010’s ‘Nightmare’.
“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,” he said.
He continued: “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.”
Avenged Sevenfold’s third album ‘City Of Evil’ features some the band’s most popular and famous tracks. Upon its release, it also landed the 30th spot on the Billboard 200 chart and has since gone platinum in the US and gold in both Canada and the UK. Having sold 2,500,000 units worldwide, it was the best-selling album in the band’s discography as of 2020.
Their fifth album ‘Nightmare’, on the other hand, earned the Number One spot on the US Billboard 200 chart and was certified Gold by the BPI and Platinum by both the RIAA and Music Canada. As of April 2021, the album has sold over a million copies.
After being asked if he views the albums differently now compared to when they first released them, Vengeance told NME: “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!”
He continued: “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..’.”
Elsewhere, Avenged Sevenfold closed out this year’s edition of Download Festival with a mammoth headline slot on the Apex Stage – a decade after they first headlined the iconic rock festival.
In a four-star review of Download 2024, NME shared: “At first glance, Download 2024 seemed to be marred by a range of factors that could have signalled its downfall – even festival boss Andy Copping admitted that it was the “hardest year” to secure a line-up and the team approached over “21 bands” to find headliners.
“Pair that with the threat of boycott in retaliation against the Barclays sponsorship and news that this year could be the wettest in a century, and the hopes of it coming out smoothly began to waver. Yet, against the odds the festival delivers one of its most promising editions in recent memory, and proves that it is one of the main events leading the way when it comes to creating opportunities for the next generation of headliners.”
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