Avenged Sevenfold - Life Is But A Dream -2023- ... Today

“We were bored,” Shadows told Kerrang! around the album’s release. “Playing ‘Bat Country’ for the ten-thousandth time felt like a museum exhibit. We either had to make something that terrified us, or we had to stop.”

Across the album’s 53 minutes, the band careens through genres with ADHD abandon. “Mattel” mixes industrial clangor with a soaring, Beatles-esque bridge. “We Love You” is a schizophrenic masterpiece—alternating between a thrumming Daft Punk-esque synth loop, a thrash metal breakdown, and a lounge-jazz piano outro. “Beautiful Morning” channels Alice in Chains’ sludge, while “Cosmic” is a ten-minute prog-epic that floats through Pink Floyd space rock before collapsing into a screaming metalcore finale. Avenged Sevenfold - Life Is But A Dream -2023- ...

“Nobody,” “Cosmic,” “Mattel,” “We Love You” “We were bored,” Shadows told Kerrang

“We’re not trying to be different for the sake of it,” drummer Brooks Wackerman (a jazz-trained powerhouse who joined in 2015) explained. “We’re trying to be honest. And the truth is, we don’t feel like a heavy metal band anymore. We feel like a band who used to play heavy metal.” Where does Life Is But a Dream rank in Avenged Sevenfold’s catalog? That’s the wrong question. It exists outside the catalog. It’s not a sequel to The Stage or a return to form. It’s a declaration of independence from form itself. We either had to make something that terrified

The closest reference point isn’t metal at all. It’s Mr. Bungle, Frank Zappa, or late-period Radiohead—artists who weaponize genre whiplash to keep the listener off-balance. Lyrically, Life Is But a Dream is a meditation on absurdism. The title is a direct quote from the Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th-century play La vida es sueño . Shadows spends the album wrestling with Albert Camus’ question: If life has no inherent meaning, is that a tragedy or a liberation?

Life is but a dream. And sometimes, the best dreams are the ones that make no sense at all—the ones you wake up from thinking, “What the hell was that?” before immediately wanting to fall back asleep and see where it goes.

On “Nobody,” the lead single, he asks: “ Tell me who’s the one to show the way? / No one. ” It’s a defiant anthem of optimistic nihilism. On the brutal closer, “(D)eath,” the album resolves not with a metal fist-pump but with a quiet, synthesized acceptance: an ambient elegy that fades into static, as if the dreamer has finally woken up.