Avenged Sevenfold Life Is But A Dream CD (2023)

Avenged Sevenfold spent years being the band that metalcore kids grew up with, then spent the next decade confusing those same kids on purpose. Life Is But A Dream (2023) is the logical conclusion of that trajectory, and it is genuinely strange, ambitious, disorienting heavy music that owes as much to prog and avant-garde composition as it does to anything with a breakdown.

This is not City of Evil. It is not meant to be. The album leans hard into existential dread and conceptual weirdness, with M. Shadows delivering some of his most unsettling vocal performances over arrangements that shift and collapse under themselves. Love it or hate it, it is the most interesting thing they have released in over a decade, and the kind of record that rewards multiple listens even when it frustrates you. The kind of album that ends up meaning something.

Full length studio album on CD, 2023 release. Country of origin: USA. Genre: heavy metal, progressive metal.

Fans of: Deftones, Coheed and Cambria, Devin Townsend.