Avenged Sevenfold are up to something… and it seems as though they’re telling fans to take a break from the internet for a bit until they’re ready to make an announcement.
As expected, Avenged Sevenfold are going absolutely next-level when it comes to (presumably) teasing their long-awaited new album.
With drummer Brooks Wackerman previously confirming the record – the follow-up to 2016’s The Stage – will drop in 2023, it looks like the band are finally getting ready to launch very soon, with some very intricate teasing pointing to a website that simply reads: ‘Time to go touch some grass…’ (Basically, get off the internet now until they’re ready to announce – or, at least, that’s what we think they’re saying.)
A7X kicked off their cryptic online scavenger hunt last month by apparently getting ‘hacked’, with a fake announcement that a couple of their massive upcoming festival appearances had been cancelled. This naughty hacker was discovered to be Libad5343, with a website of the same name the launching and feeding fans all sorts of breadcrumbs (there is an incredible 59-page Google Doc here with every single morsel of info).
In short, one of the biggest clues from Libad5343 was a set of coordinates pointing to San Jose, California venue The Ritz, which has a sign on it saying ‘Libad5343 Presents Nobody’. There could well be an event there soon as it’s closed this coming Monday (March 6) and fans found a hidden phrase saying, ‘Meet at midnight on Monday’.
Interestingly, it’s also thought that ‘Libad’ could be an acronym for Avenged’s new album title – the most compelling theory so far is that it stands for Life Is But A Dream. On the band’s Discord yesterday (March 2) Libad5343 even played an audio clip of the nursery rhyme Row, Row, Row Your Boat – which of course finishes with the line, ‘Life is but a dream.’
So… it seems like we might find out more on Monday?
Of course, Avenged’s last album The Stage was released without any of this fanfare – they went for an ambitious surprise-release approach. Speaking to Kerrang! at the time, frontman M. Shadows enthused, “I think it’s great for artists to sit there and go, ‘Well, we’re gonna do it this way, and if it works then cool. But if it doesn’t, that’s fine.’ People have to try things, and we’re hoping that this encourages people to try things. We don’t want them to do what we did, but maybe they put out a record with four songs, and then four months later another record with four songs comes out – it’s just different ways of getting music, because people don’t have time necessarily to listen to all these breadcrumbs and all these singles. It’s a different world.”
Read this: 7 things we want from the new Avenged Sevenfold album
