Hi everyone, Nightthony Maretano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this Avenged Sevenfold EP, STATICA.

Famed metal outfit – or at least at one time a metal outfit – Avenged Sevenfold, they're back with their first notable release in three years. It was back in 2023 that they dropped their Life is But a Dream record, which I will admit, given that I am not the most massive fan of Avenged Sevenfold, was the only project in their catalog I saw fit to cover extensively.

I mean, look, when it comes to modern metal standards, for the most part I think Avenged are fine. I hold no hate in my heart for Hail to the King or their self-titled record, but even though these guys are not a part of my regular listening diet, I had to cover Life is But a Dream because it was just such a unique opportunity.

It was a record that was pitched as this progressive, wildly experimental, even avant-garde switch-up, but when I actually listened to it, it was really just a hunk of crap. A hunk of noisy, messy, badly mixed, badly written, badly performed crap that saw Avenged Sevenfold making all of these just blatantly failed attempts at these different modes of left-field music and avant-garde metal music that just didn't play to their strengths at all. And again, on top of that, it just kind of felt like the production across this thing was so bottom of the barrel, as if they just kind of threw it together over a weekend or something and didn't really care how the final product sounded.

Now, believe it or not, even though this record has not really gone down with the best reputation over the past few years, at the time when I reviewed this project, I got, from what I can remember, a decent amount of pushback for it from fans of the band, who maybe were squinting their eyes a little bit too hard to see the vision. I mean, they definitely saw something, I guess, and were finding some way to get at least a little bit of enjoyment out of the album, enough to defend it. But now, a few years later, down the road, we have this new STATICA EP, and I feel like it's important to talk about this one as well, just to do maybe a little bit of a check-in.

Because even though this thing is just a little four-track long journey, it's somehow found a way to be actually even worse than the last album. What M. Shadows and the band were thinking on this one, I really have no clue. I really have no idea. Maybe they heard that AI is now out here making the worst music known to man, and for whatever reason they've taken that personally.

And then, additionally, you have this new Strokes album, of course, Reality Awaits, where famously Julian Casablancas insists on using an exorbitant amount of autotune on pretty much every track. It sounds out of place, it sounds awful – at least that's how I and a lot of other people feel about the album. And Avenged Sevenfold actually use autotune all over this record as well, and somehow find a way to make it sound worse.

Before I get into the detail, the only good thing or saving grace I can say that there is about this EP is that it's four tracks, that's it. It doesn't go any longer than that. By the time this thing is reaching its final moments, I am crying, "Uncle, please, for fuck's sake, just end."

This thing starts off horrible from the jump, doesn't even give you room to breathe, with the song "Lights," which features all of these congealed blobs of vocoder bile that go down like sour milk, and, of course, are set to these, spooky, ooky cartoon show chord progressions and blocky drum machine beats and stuttering hi-hats that sound like robot sharts. The music literally sounds like what would play in the background of a terrible 2D scroller on the NES back in the '90s, maybe a game built around the Tales from the Crypt franchise or something. Again, it's a torture chamber already and this is just the intro.

Then there's the title track, and it's more lo-fi, badly put together, goddamn awful Halloween rock. which I cannot stress enough. The quality of this thing sounds like just a bad local band demo. This does not come across like something a professional grade music outfit would make or approve. Plus, you have M. Shadows just absolutely howling through the autotune on this one, sounding, again, kind of like a cross between Julian Casablancas on that new Strokes album and maybe 808s era Kanye West. Plus, the drums on this thing just hit like garbage. This doesn't even feel like a full band recording. This sounds like something M. Shadows threw together at home and then just plopped onto the internet.

After this, the song "Rejoice" kind of sounds like a leftover from Muse's political rock anthem record Will of the People. It's bad conspiracy alt-metal or maybe Nine Inch Nails, but if Trent Reznor were a fedora-rocking libertarian. On some level, I can appreciate the commentary around cameras and surveillance and mass media, but I'm not really sure if all the shrill, glitchy synth arpeggios that are just spilling violently all over these repetitive, mind-numbing guitar riffs was the move. It just sounds like an '80s arcade cabinet vibe vomiting all over the mix. And the song somehow even devolves from there into these falsetto passages that feel almost Imagine Dragons coded. And then, legitimately, this kind of spacey, synthy outro with a super chunky beat behind it that, again, feels like Ye's 808s era.

And then with "Ashes," the band saved the biggest autotune abortion on this whole thing for last, with so much aggressive warbling transitioning from one note to the next as M. Shadows tries to deliver this kind of rock opera performance through the goddamn plug-in. And then at one point... I don't know, this song is just a confusing mess. It's a total haze of insanity. It feels like, in addition to the autotune, some vocoder gets thrown into the mix, too. And of course, that makes it all sound even worse.

All the bass synth farts that get more and more prominent as we go deeper into the song aren't helping either. Also, it's kind of weird that this track sort of thrives off of this linear, almost kind of proggy, modern rock groove with a Latin flair. It feels almost like if the Mars Volta was started by dudes who didn't come from At the Drive-In, but instead came from a tech startup.

But yeah, thankfully, after this track reaches a total peak headache of insanity, the whole EP is over, it's done. And I think I can say handily, this is the worst music this band's ever recorded. This is the worst music they have ever released to the public. And I worry that maybe at some point, in the near or even distant future, we will receive an entire album of material just like this, or maybe somehow even worse. Because if that happens, that will be a very dark day indeed. And I do not want to see that day. Please spare me of that day. If this is a hint of what is to come, I implore, don't do it! This is truly rock bottom, creatively, for this band. Why are we here? It did not need to go this way because nobody asked for this.

But again, I feel like part of the reason that we're here is because, maybe to the band, their last record sounded good enough to them. Or maybe it had enough supporters or enough vocal fans being like, "yeah, yeah, no, this is cool. You just don't get it." Well, now we're here making music that is measurably even worse than that album, and I feel like we need to just pump the brakes. The brakes need to be pumped. Can we pump the brakes? And maybe turn the car around or something? Can we go in a different direction?

And maybe the only silver lining I can take from this cloud is that when it comes to truly awful, terrible, unlistenable music, unlistenable, nothing on this planet is gonna do that better than a human fucking being. Which is why I'm feeling a 0 on this. I'm feeling a strong 0 to a light 1. Like, what the hell?

Anthony Fantano. Avenged Sevenfold. Forever.