Avenged Sevenfold’s Statica EP is a goofy, auto-tuned mess – and exactly the kind of risk more big metal bands should take

Let’s not bury the lede here: I don’t like Avenged Sevenfold’s Statica EP. Having listened to it multiple times since it was surprise-released on Friday, I think it’s an overcooked misfire, burying potentially winning songs under goofy effects and enough Auto-Tune to make T-Pain go ‘bit much’. But I also respect the hell out of it.

Avenged didn’t need to make four tracks that evoke the feeling of tripping balls in a hall of mirrors. They’re Grammy-nominated Billboard 200 chart-toppers whose throwback sound – inspired by Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and SoCal hardcore – was revolutionary as nu metal ate itself. Waking The Fallen and City Of Evil are classic albums for countless millennials. They could have carried on, kept churning out pale imitations of hit singles Hail To The King and Afterlife, and they’d have kept filling arenas and headlining festivals. No problem.

I know this because so many other metal bands have followed this exact course – and it’s boring as sin. I could list dozens of names who made it big and then clung to the same formula for the rest of their careers, and dozens more who closely imitated their forebears without adding an original spin. You could too. And most of the artists who break the mould sooner or later return to it: remember when Metallica appeased the St Anger haters with the safely thrashy Death Magnetic?

Where reinvention is expected and encouraged in genres like pop (Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, the highest-grossing tour ever, was a celebration of all her sonic and aesthetic changes), metal fears it. Broadly speaking, when you’ve amassed a countercultural fanbase who seek catharsis in hellion screams and noisy riffs, you can’t take the pedal off the metal without disappointing someone.

The fact that plenty of metalheads consider heavy music to be anti-everything else, rather than just one other genre in the hundreds of genres out there, makes things harder. From Metallica’s Black Album to Deafheaven’s purely shoegazing Infinite Granite, almost every album where a major metal band incorporated less aggressive stuff has been lambasted as ‘selling out’, regardless of the fact their wallets were probably fine beforehand.

This leaves musicians with two options: live in the same bubble you always have, or take charge and put fans in their place. The latter is scary, not just because of all the hate-comments you risk receiving in the short term, but the longer-term possibilities of playing smaller venues and dropping down bills. It can ruin you, like Suicide Silence’s career-derailing self-titled album did, or it can catapult you. Where would Bring Me The Horizon be if they were too frightened to make Sempiternal and kept copying There Is A Hell… every other year? Not headlining Download and leaving every other metalcore band in their dust, I’d wager.

While I’m never going to be at the front of the queue for Statica cheerleading practice, I at least admire what Avenged are doing. It’s a wild, if uneven, blast of colour in a scene often content with black. I’m not the same person that I was when Nightmare came out in 2010, and if you expect them to be, you’re putting unnecessary limits on artistry.

(LouderSound)