Avenged Sevenfold put on a pretty memorable couple of shows when they were here for Soundwave a couple of months ago and haven’t stopped since! Currently on tour in South Africa, lead singer M. Shadows took a few minutes to catch up withLoudwire and talk about the bands latest record & the video game that they released in December!

What was the biggest challenge in putting together the album and what has been the nicest pay off for you so far?

The biggest challenge had to be containing ourselves and trying to stick to our original vision of doing something a little more groove-oriented, a little more stripped back and riff based. Also sticking to the blues, we like to kind of venture out and do a lot of stuff that is a little more neo-classical and get a little more melodic minor in our music. Staying in the blues is really tough for us but that was the vision from the beginning and we wanted to make sure the whole record stayed with the concept.

The biggest payoff has been getting the South American tour, the biggest songs we are playing are from Hail to the King. Everything from Nightmare to Hail to the King is just going over so big down here. That is a good thing because you dont want to be a band where you are putting out new records and people just want to hear old stuff. That has been very, very cool.

You guys are solid storytellers in what youre doing musically. Who were some of the people that inspired you in terms of your own songwriting?

Thank you. For us, I like a lot of people like that can express themselves emotionally without coming off cheesy or the new word, emo. For me, listening to bands likePink Floydand the Rolling Stones, they do it so well. Im not really very talented at doing that so Im a little bit better at doing theMaidenthing, where you can tell a story and maybe have some different you get your point across in different ways.Bruce Dickinsonhas always been amazing at painting a picture. Our band has always been really big on imagery weve kind of used that as one of our strengths, we tend to do that pretty well. Thats kind of the vibe we go for. We dont like to be too mushy or too overly emotional.

You mentioned the imagery. Thats one of the thing thats always been cool about the band, you get a full package. You take everything into consideration. Was that the game plan from day one for Avenged Sevenfold? Was there something that inspired or laid that out for you?

Yeah. When we were growing up we listened to all sorts of music but the first band that really grabbed all of us live wasAFI. What they were doing out there, their image compared to everything else that was on Warped Tour and then you go see them at the Bren Events Center in Irvine, they were just always doing this cool they were just over the top with their gothic imagery. Then Maiden, I was a fan but I had never seen them live. Then with Eddie, seeing their shows.

Always from day one, we were the band on Warped Tour with a fog machine and our backdrop had to be up everyone thought we were the biggest idiots for that, total posers. But for us, we wanted to be over the top. We had stage names when we were 17-years-old because we liked the over the top aspect of it. We loved thatAxlwas a fake name, we loved thatSlashwas a fake name. We just love that whole, completely enamored with the whole rock n roll thing. But AFI was the first band in our scene that we felt like were really pushing the limits of their live show.

So we just kept doing it, kept pushing the limits and now where we are now, now its hard to push the limits because we dont know what else we can do. But, at the same time, its fun to be creative with it.

The Hail to the King: Deathbat game that you guys are working on I know youre a big fan of storytelling games. Tell me a little bit about how the game came together and your involvement in it.

We were just looking for another medium on being able to be creative. Music videos, they just dont cut it anymore. The way that bands were able to express themselves, they dont really exist. Theres a lot of either youre on Facebook or Twitter just annoying everybody about what youre eating or what country youre in and I just hate all that stuff. So one day when we were on a bus to a show in Southeast Asia about two years ago, I saw everyone on their phones and they were all playing games.

I said, Man we can make a game! And thats what kind of kicked this off. Besides that I wanted to write a triple A game completely separate from the band. I was really into doing a game. So through all these meetings and things we had put together with GDD, which is a game document design, we decided to start building this game two years ago. Now were close on doing a very expansive mobile video game, which is big enough to where it should be on a console but were squeezing it into a mobile platform. Hopefully our fans dig it and mostly, I hope gamers dig it. Its a good game, its not just for fans of the band.

Check out the rest of the interview at Loudwire