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Avenged Sevenfold diss Warner Music “imbeciles”

By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 2 February 2017

Avenged Sevenfold guitarist Zacky Vengeance (or Zachary Baker if you prefer) has had a little dig at the good people at his former label Warner Music in a new interview with The National Student, given ahead of a recent show at The O2. “Imbeciles”, he called them. Imbeciles!

As previously reported, the metallers are currently in the midst of a legal battle with the major. Warner sued the band just over a year ago after they declared that they were no longer signed to the record company, despite having only delivered four of the five albums they committed to release under their 2004 record deal. The Californian band cited that always popular ‘seven year rule’ that exists in the state’s employment law, which allows for ‘personal service’ contracts to be cancelled after seven years.

As all that legal wrangling worked its way through the motions, Avenged Sevenfold got about signing to Universal’s Capitol and working on a new album. Warner, meanwhile, announced it was putting out a best of collection without the band’s involvement. A release date was set for the latter record of 2 Dec last year.

There’s a minor conspiracy theory that Warner picked that date after Chris Jericho of the band Fozzy – a close friend of Avenged Sevenfold – indicated on the socials that his best mates’ new studio album would come out on 9 Dec. Warner went with a week earlier for the unendorsed best of as a spoiler tactic, reckons the conspiracy theory. Avenged Sevenfold, of course, then surprise released new album ‘The Stage’ during a much hyped virtual reality live stream in late October.

“As far as our old label is concerned, we had no idea they were even going to attempt any of that”, Vengeance tells The National Student of the best of compilation. “We didn’t know about that until the album was coming up. We actually thought it was quite hysterical when they were misled by a fake tweet that Chris Jericho sent out, and that just kind of shows what kind of a label they were in the first place; that they were led on by that rumour”.

He continues: “That’s, obviously, why we wouldn’t want to be with a team of people that were – I mean, I hate to use the word ‘imbeciles’, but I’ll go ahead and use the word – imbeciles”.

Though, if you’re buying part two of the conspiracy theory – that the band only did the surprise release to piss of the imbeciles at Warner, no, that wasn’t it at all.

“For us, it was about surprising our fans”, Vengeance says elsewhere in the new interview. “Because, for [previous album] ‘Hail To The King’ we did the three-month roll-out and we could sense the boredom in our fans: ‘Oh, Avenged is trolling us. They’re doing the campaign and doing scavenger hunts, just release the fucking songs already! We just wanna hear the album!’ This time, we gave them nothing and then we gave them the album, like, ‘Here you go. Make up your mind!'”