“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.
The result is the most audacious, polarizing, and unexpectedly profound album of their career. The seven-year gap between 2016’s The Stage and Life Is But a Dream was fraught. The pandemic, personal losses, and a collective existential reckoning pushed the band to the brink of creative exhaustion. Guitarist Synyster Gates and frontman M. Shadows have both admitted in interviews that they considered walking away entirely.
Then comes “Game Over.” A lurching, glitchy synth stutter erupts into a frantic punk-metal blast beat, with Shadows half-singing, half-rapping about nihilism and video game mechanics. “ I’m not running / I’m just standing at the edge of the world ,” he sneers. It’s jarring. It’s awkward. And then it’s brilliant.
How the heaviest band of the 2000s metalcore scene decided to burn down their own rulebook—and found enlightenment in the wreckage. Avenged Sevenfold - Life Is But A Dream -2023- ...
Mr. Bungle, Radiohead’s Kid A , Devin Townsend, and existential dread with a killer guitar solo.
Terrify us, they did. From its first seconds, Life Is But a Dream announces itself as a trickster. The opening title track is a two-minute, solo piano instrumental—a delicate, melancholy waltz that sounds like Debussy scoring a David Lynch film. No guitar heroics. No drums. Just a lonely melody that feels like walking through a dream you can’t wake up from.
“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.” “We’re not trying to be different for the
Not for everyone. Essential for anyone who’s ever wondered what happens when a metal band decides to stop being a metal band.
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.
In an era where rock and metal are often treated as heritage genres—nostalgia acts playing the hits in increasingly smaller venues—Avenged Sevenfold chose to make something genuinely weird. It may cost them radio play. It may shrink their next arena tour. But it will also ensure that this album is debated, dissected, and defended for years to come. We feel like a band who used to play heavy metal
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?
“Nobody,” “Cosmic,” “Mattel,” “We Love You”
For two decades, the Huntington Beach quintet had been the reliable titans of modern heavy metal. From the genre-defining fury of Waking the Fallen to the chart-topping arena anthems of Hail to the King , A7X had built an empire on a formula—soaring vocals, dueling guitar harmonies, double-bass drum barrages, and the late Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan’s manic genius. But with their eighth studio album, Life Is But a Dream , the band didn’t just step outside their comfort zone. They detonated it, took a left turn into a Dadaist funhouse, and invited listeners to either come along for the ride or get left behind.
This is not a “metal” album about partying, revenge, or Satan. It’s a midlife crisis set to music—and that honesty is what makes it so gripping. Unsurprisingly, the reaction has been a civil war. On Reddit and YouTube, purists have howled. “Unlistenable,” “pretentious,” “where are the riffs?” are common refrains. Longtime fans expecting another Nightmare felt betrayed by the lack of conventional hooks and the abundance of abstract noise.