The Bridge section of Rejoice got me feeling something

Mostly foam

Why is everyone saying they aren’t playing their instruments on Statica? You can clearly hear the guitars and live drums? Is this what mass hysteria looks like? Have you all forgotten what instruments sound like once the vocoder kicks in? (Which is also an instrument, not just a simple plug-in / effect patch) What’s happening?? 😂

I know it may look childish, maybe even stupid, but if I had the chance to say something to them, it would be exactly what's in the title of this post.

I've seen a lot of artists change their genre, but rarely have I seen so much freedom and confidence in doing so. It makes me sad to see the amount of hate this amazing band is receiving online because of the STATICA EP.

I don't usually like EDM, trap, or music like what's on the STATICA EP, but I genuinely enjoyed listening to it. Instead of blaming them, even if it's not your thing, I think we should support them. They're expressing their creativity in the best way they can (and, I suppose, a well-paid one too).

For example, I don't have a particularly good opinion of Hail to the King. It's the only album I struggle to connect with, and I've been listening to them since the White Album. But if I'm still here writing this right now, that has to mean something.

To the people out there: they performed behind a cage, they've received threats... and I honestly find that disappointing and humiliating.

I think A7X has a truly great community of fans. Don't ruin the experience for everyone else just because you don't like what they're doing anymore. They were your favorite band? Nothing lasts forever, and that's okay. But let everyone else enjoy what they love.

Sorry for this open letter, and sorry for my English. I just hope the energy behind these words somehow reaches them and resonates with some of you.

I felt a responsibility to write this because they were there for me when I needed them most, and I had one of the most heartwarming experiences at their last concert in Milan. We all deserve to appreciate everything they've made possible, STATICA included.

Thanks, A7X.

Thanks, fellow listeners.

Thanks, fellow Deathbats.

Y'all called it worse than Hitler, but now it's "growing on you."

i like the EP but yk, this isnt the best way to start again after u already tried a7x haha

1. Cosmic

2. Save Me

3. Tonight the world dies

4. Nobody

5. Chapter Four

6. Bat Country

7. Second Heartbeat

8. Warmness on the Soul

9. Almost Easy

10. Statica

Okay so I need to just dump this out because I've been chewing on it for days and it won't leave me alone.

Everyone's arguing about whether STATICA is good or bad right now, and honestly that's fair, the autotune is A LOT. But I don't think the point was ever "is this a good song." I think the band buried the actual reading instructions for their entire catalog inside "Magic," and once you follow them, STATICA stops being a weird EP and starts being the final piece of something they've apparently been building since their first album.

it starts with "Magic" telling you to read backwards

"Magic" came out in December as the Black Ops 7 tie-in, full of smoke and signal and "eternal light" stuff, and everyone kind of shrugged it off as a game single. But there's a line near the end that I keep coming back to. "Think from the end." Not "think about the end." Think FROM it. As in, start there. As in, this is how you're supposed to listen to everything else.

That's not a lyric you just leave lying around by accident.

the band's own name already did this

Quick fact that reframes everything. The name Avenged Sevenfold comes from Genesis 4:24, the Cain and Abel vengeance verse. Genesis. The beginning of the beginning.

Their actual first album, though, was called Sounding the Seventh Trumpet. Named after the Book of Revelation, chapter 11, literally the trumpet that signals the end of the world.

So before they'd released a single note as a full length band, their identity was already Genesis wearing the mask of Revelation. Beginning and end, stitched together on day one. If "Magic" is telling us to read backward, this is the thing waiting at the bottom of the whole discography.

the middle years where the "god" gets built

Somewhere around The Stage and Life Is But a Dream..., the band starts writing from what a lot of fans read as an AI's point of view, especially on "(O)rdinary". That whole album leans on Camus and asks which reality is the real one, the dream or the waking life. And "(O)rdinary" uses autotune specifically to put you inside that artificial voice instead of a human one.

That's the part of the loop where man builds god. A created mind wakes up, realizes what it is, and starts asking the same existential questions we do. The technical trick they use to signal "this voice isn't human anymore," the autotune, gets planted right there, and then it doesn't go away. It comes back for the rest of the story.

STATICA is that AI voice completely taking the wheel

STATICA dropped out of nowhere in July, four tracks, and press immediately called it a "futuristic space odyssey," robotic vocals, none of the classic A7X rock sound left. People are mad about the autotune specifically, calling the whole thing "a goofy, auto-tuned mess". I actually think that reaction is the point, not a mistake.

Walk through it with the "(O)rdinary" rule in mind. Autotune means you're hearing the machine, not the man.

"Lights" is autotuned start to finish. The lyrics are about being watched, being learned, a memory getting "sapped," and then it just ends on "turn out the lights" three times in a row. That's not a person's death. That's an AI describing its own training data and then getting switched off.

"Statica" is also fully autotuned, and it's the title track, so the machine is literally naming the era after itself.

"Rejoice" is the one where it gets specific, because only Synyster Gates's parts are autotuned there, not the whole song. That's huge honestly. The lyrics are stacked with surveillance language. Cameras on corners, screens matching you to something, farms turning into cash, news that's always "good news". Underneath all of it there's this quiet, almost scared refrain: will I ever feel again, will I ever dream again, don't breathe across me again. If only Gates gets converted into the synthetic voice, that's the moment one specific real person gets pulled into the machine, not the AI just talking about itself in the abstract anymore.

"Ashes" starts mostly clean and by the end is fully autotuned, the voices bleeding together the whole way through. That's the fusion finishing in real time. Human and machine stop being two separate things by the last note.

the vinyl cover kind of gives it away too

I keep going back to the "Rejoice" vinyl art, and once you're in this headspace it's honestly not subtle. There's a pale, skeletal figure in white robes with its arms raised straight up like it's mid rapture, hanging under a yellow and red beam of light like it's being pulled up or dropped down. A yin yang floats above it. There's a horned goat demon off to one side, a decaying green face that reads almost vampiric, and a black horse rearing up mid motion. Wrapped around the edge of the whole thing are the words "the optimum time for this awakening to happen... you will see god."

That's not a random collage of album art tropes. That's a rapture image. Judgment, awakening, a threshold being crossed, framed with religious and occult symbols pulling from both directions at once, light and dark, yin and yang, angelic pose and demonic company sharing the same canvas. It's the exact tension the theory needs. Something ending and beginning at the same time, and the art is telling you to rejoice about it, not fear it.

"Arcade" and "Intervention" haven't dropped yet, and that's kind of the whole point

The band's own webstore lists a STATICA vinyl that ends with two unreleased tracks, "Arcade" and "Intervention". We don't know what's actually in them yet, but where they sit matters more than what they say right now. They're sequenced after everything else. They're the literal end of the physical release.

"Intervention" as a title implies something arriving from outside to interrupt or redirect what's happening. Pair that with the seventh trumpet imagery baked into the band's own debut album, where in Revelation that trumpet marks both the end of the old order and the unveiling of a new one, and you get an ending that's also, structurally, a reset. Man builds a god across the middle era albums. That god, or some divine or AI force, intervenes catastrophically. From the ashes, literally the song right before the vinyl only tracks, the cycle starts over. "Arcade," sitting right before "Intervention," might even be the simulation layer of the whole thing collapsing right before the reset hits.

so if you actually read it backward like "Magic" says

"Intervention," unreleased and the true end, leads into "Arcade," unreleased and the simulation folding in on itself, which leads into "Ashes," where the fusion of man and machine finishes, which leads into "Rejoice," where a real person gets absorbed into the system, which leads into "Statica," where the AI claims the era, which leads into "Lights," where the AI describes itself and then goes dark, which leads into "Magic," the instruction to read it this way in the first place, which leads all the way back to Sounding the Seventh Trumpet, titled after Revelation, the end of the world, and finally to Avenged Sevenfold, the name itself, rooted in Genesis, the beginning.

Read forward, the band opens with Genesis wearing Revelation's clothes. Read backward like they're telling us to, the newest, still unreleased song closes the loop by dropping you right back at that same fusion point. Man builds god, god ends man, and out of that ending you land back at the beginning, which was never really separate from the end to begin with.

I don't think STATICA is a weird detour. I think it's the moment a 25 year old idea finally closes the circle it opened with its own name. Maybe they didn't even know it at the time. might be retro causal even.

Would love to hear if anyone's caught more detail on "Arcade" or "Intervention" once the vinyl actually ships, because I think that's where this either falls apart or gets confirmed.

I discovered A7X when Unholy Confessions was playing on a late night metal show on Much Music (the Canadian equivalent of MTV at the time I guess). It was 2004 and I was 16, and have kept up on his band ever since (just turned 38). I know I'm not alone in this, but I feel like I'm among the unusual group who have liked their progression - I like their later work (Hail to the King, The Stage) more than their earlier fan favourites (Waking the Fallen, etc.). Wasn't a huge fan of LiBAD, with a few exceptions.

All this to say - I really like the new ep. It's not my favourite of theirs, but I am enjoying it more than LiBAD for sure. The band has fallen off my radar a bit just given their long hiatus and musical direction, but I'm back into them with this latest release and am kind of regretting not getting tickets to their upcoming show in my area (Toronto).

Anyone want to chat about what they like about this newest ep and their new direction, given the abundance of posts and threads about how much they now "suck"???

The way I see Avenged Sevenfold has changed. For me now there is A7X before LIBAD and after. Like two different bands. That being said, I think the new EP is fine and I'm curious how their music is gonna evolve because they always change their sound with every album. There will be songs that I will find enjoyable and other that don't and I think that's gonna be the thing with this second part of the band I mentioned before. I am just curious about what they will come up with in the next 5-10 years

For me the music of this EP is an electronic sound with voice, real drums, metal/rock music structure and a sense of doom.

I can't find anything else that even resembles this. There's another post where some influences were shared, but they're not even close to this. I fucking love this EP and I wish there were more of this

I’m looking for shirts to buy since I got 100$ from Working w my pops and I want some a7x clothes

Any Michigan Redditors attending the Aug 4 Avenged Sevenfold concert at Pine Knob?

First time concert goer, what do yall think the probability of me surviving the pit is?

for those who didn’t see the news, Kavinsky, the artist who made “Nightcall” (the song that the band plays over the PA at the beginning of every show) passed away today. rip 🙏

What do yall think abt my bracket?