UNHOLY CONFESSIONS (Waking The Fallen, 2003)
It was the song that put Avenged on everyone’s radar, and over 15 years on, it remains their hallmark anthem
Chances are, if you came to Avenged Sevenfold on the Waking The Fallen album, it would be thanks to Unholy Confessions. And with good reason; as well as being the biggest single from their breakthrough record, it’s an absolute, iron-clad anthem, still the only track from that era to remain a live staple and, for many Avenged fans of a certain age, the definitive A7X anthem. While there were certainly still elements of the metalcore tag that Avenged had thus
far earned themselves – some screamed vocals here, a chuggy breakdown there – make no mistake about it: this is a heavy fucking metal song. Twin guitar leads, harmonised choruses… hell, even the lyrics were metal, managing to make a story seemingly about a shitty relationship sound like something out of a power metal track: ‘When sin’s deep in my blood, you’ll be the one to fall.’
“I wouldn’t say Unholy Confessions is a well-written song by any means,” offers Shadows today, somewhat humbly. “But
at the time it worked, and it became what it is… nostalgia!”
There are many things that make Unholy Confessions stand apart in the canon of Avenged Sevenfold, but the actual creation of the track was something that particularly sticks out as the frontman reminisces on the song’s conception. Indeed, Shadows goes as far to suggest that the making of Unholy Confessions was, by Avenged Sevenfold standards, something of “a weird one”.
“Zack had a riff that he had been playing over and over and over in the
garage,” reveals the frontman. “We would jam on it a little bit but we didn’t really know what to do with it. Then we left for tour – it was some sort of [suicide awareness initiative] Take Action tour or something. We were staying at our booking agent’s house in Chicago and we said,
‘Let’s write a song.’ So we all wrote in separate rooms.”
It was a method that had been untested by the band to that point and, looking back, was not a formula they ever ultimately looked to replicate – “We’ve never done that since!” laughs Shadows now.
“I came up with the chorus for Unholy Confessions and we kind of put it on the backburner,” he says of the eventual fruits of that unusually fractured jamming session. “When we got back home to Orange County, we had that riff and we had the chorus; we just needed some stupid, meaty breakdown! Ha ha ha! And that part of the song came together. We put the dumb-dumb breakdown with the riff, and then we [already] had this chorus… it’s funny how those things happen; it’s like a moment in time.”
A simple song it may have become, but the fact is that Unholy Confessions struck a chord with a young metal crowd that had so far been weaned on nu metal and shiny, Gothenburg-influenced metalcore. Even at that early stage, Avenged felt just a little different from those around them, and the hype train began to roll.
Fascinatingly, while Unholy Confessions remains the most (in?)famous of the Waking The Fallen cuts, Shadows insists it was never really meant to be a single at all… and technically, kinda still isn’t.
“Honestly! It wasn’t really a single!” he states. “I think Chapter Four and Eternal
Rest were the first two songs we put out, it wasn’t Unholy Confessions. But we were in a bidding war for the next record, which would be City Of Evil, and whoever we signed with wanted to do a music video for a song on Waking The Fallen.
So, when we signed with
Warner Brothers, they said,
‘Let’s make a music video that we’ll put out, and that’ll kind of boost Waking The Fallen before you guys drop City Of Evil.’
That’s how it happened. It was
[released] well after that album had come out!”
The plan worked. The video, stapling live footage to shots taken backstage at gigs and segments featuring some of their biggest fans, raised
Avenged’s profile considerably in the ranks of the Myspace generation. Soon they had become the hottest young band in the metalcore scene.
Not bad for a track with
“dumb-dumb” breakdowns and heavy metal lyrics pulled from angsty teen woes.
“I don’t think it was a real-life inspiration,” says Shadows of those aforementioned lyrics, “other than things I was dealing with. When you’re a kid, you are just pulling from your own angsty little heart, and that’s kind of what that was.”
The band may be somewhat lovingly dismissive of the song now, but the stats don’t lie: Unholy Confessions
is by far and away Avenged Sevenfold’s most-played song ever, serving as the band’s standard set-closer right up until their most recent world tour in 2018.
“It’s kind of like our Hit The Lights,”
suggests Shadows of how the song has managed to close out almost every Avenged Sevenfold setlist over the years. “It’s one of the first things people heard, it’s a throwback at the end. We’ve tried ending with other things but it goes over well and I think it’s one of those things where, at the very end of the night, to throw things back to 2003 or whenever that came out, is pretty cool. There’s no science behind it, it’s just what we do! Ha ha ha!”
Whether it’s by nature or by design, Unholy Confessions has remained one of its era’s most beloved tracks. And, chances are, it always will.
“IT’S NOT A WELLWRITTEN SONG!” M SHADOWS
“I HAD TO SING THAT STUPID THING OVER AND OVER”
M SHADOWS
BAT COUNTRY
(City Of Evil, 2005)
It was the song that truly launched City Of Evil
and saw Avenged Sevenfold a band reborn. Gone were the gothed-up, pasty metalcore n00bs of 2003, and in their place were a gang of sneering, lairy rock stars. “It was the song that changed everything for us,” agreed Johnny Christ, before adding with a chuckle: “We became much bigger assholes!” Bat Country’s lyrics and title – and its accompanying video – were inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s delirious, drugs-bender novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, while the music perfectly captured the band’s willingness to incorporate more rock’n’roll into their sound. In fact, for a band starting to really push their own boundaries, Bat Country was built around one of Avenged’s most basic riffs: a simple, heads-down chugger far removed from some of the dense and multi-layered work going on elsewhere on the record. “I remember Jimmy brought me the demo and I was like, ‘What is this?!’” laughed Johnny. “It was the most simplistic thing!”
Ultimately, Bat Country was the song that would define the City Of Evil era and firmly establish
Avenged as the 21st century’s most exciting young metal band. “I remember [the album] sold OK the first week; then it started going down, down, down,” recalls Shadows. “We had a lot of people that were upset about the sound changing. A few months in we were like, ‘Maybe people don’t get it?!’ But then this song and video catapulted us into the mainstream. Every person that was listening to Britney and the Backstreet Boys was now listening to Bat Country!”
ALMOST EASY
(Avenged Sevenfold, 2007)
Avenged love the ‘kitchen sink and more’ approach, and the second track from their self-titled opus is no exception. “We were just layering and layering stuff on,” laughed Synyster Gates later, and right from the off, it was a track that went completely full-throttle. A galloping intro, pinned together by warm piano strokes and some frenzied guitar leads, kicks into a dirty thrash riff Testament would be proud of, before the song’s unforgettable ‘I’m not insaaaaane’
refrain gives way to one of Avenged’s biggest choruses ever.
Written by The Rev, the band described Almost Easy as the “guinea pig” song for their fourth studio album, created around a piano riff craftily influenced by the score from Terminator 2. While the drummer came up with the bulk of the song, however, there were still contributions from the rest of the fold. Zacky, for instance, suggested adding the choir-like backing vocals that saw all five members harmonising under Shadows’ leads, giving the chorus an extra dimension. The layers didn’t end there; taking inspiration from an unlikely source, the band also added a sub-bass effect that gave the track an obnoxious, rumbling underbelly.
“We were listening to Lil Jon, and he would just punish people with these crazy subs. [We thought] that was a great idea!” laughed Zacky. “You feel it,” added
Syn. “When it drops in on an awesome stereo, that shit just rumbles. It’s fucking crazy.”
“Fucking crazy” is definitely one way to describe Almost Easy. We’d also go with “one of the boldest and best songs of Avenged’s entire career.”
NIGHTMARE
(Nightmare, 2010)
After the shocking loss of The Rev mere months before, many were surprised to see a new Avenged album see the light of day at all, let alone so soon. And yet, after taking time to grieve and regroup, the band knew two things: firstly, that they had to do The Rev’s memory justice by continuing their work, and secondly, that the album they’d been writing with Jimmy deserved to be heard. They just needed the right track to kick off the record and show the world that Avenged Sevenfold were far from done.
Amazingly, the opening moments on what would be such a vital song for the next chapter of Avenged’s career were actually written and recorded using some of the most basic equipment the band had ever put to tape. That’s right: those now iconic opening chimes were actually produced using a crappy old glockenspiel keyboard that M Shadows happened to have lying around. “When we tried to do a ‘real’ version of it, it just didn’t sound as good!” the singer would later admit. Morphing into an Ozzy-esque clash of swaying riffs, imperious stomp and clattering drums that just screamed
‘BIG ALBUM OPENER’, it soon became clear that the song just had to go on first. “It’s pure energy,” remarked Shadows. “It felt like the opening of a record.” The track ultimately became a defiant rallying call for Avenged and their followers. And as for that very first ‘Nightmaaaaaaaaaaaaare!’? “Dude, I remember singing that stupid thing over and over,” laughed the singer. It was certainly worth the effort.
SECOND HEARTBEAT
(Waking The Fallen, 2003)
In hindsight, it’s truly amazing that Second Heartbeat wasn’t put out as a single. Not only does it easily match and, dare we say, surpass fellow Waking The Fallen cuts Chapter Four, Unholy Confessions and Eternal Rest, but even now, 16 years on, it stands as one of the best Avenged Sevenfold songs ever. Perhaps its omission was simply down to the fact that its running time outweighs its widerknown stablemates, but hell, you could cut any three-minute chunk from its breathless seven minutes and it’d slap anything else around at the time right out of the park.
A furious, frenetic clash of snarling punk rock and full-blooded heavy metal, it represented metalcore at its absolute 21st-century apex, stitching together the best of both worlds to create something exciting and new. Despite not making it as a fully fledged single from the album, the band clearly had faith in the song to take them places; they recorded a demo of the track for a 2002 Hopeless Records compilation, and it was picked to send to producer Andrew Murdock as an example of what Avenged were capable of. The Alice Cooper and Godsmack collaborator must have been impressed; he ended up producing Avenged’s next two records.
Astonishingly, that demo version of Second Heartbeat was even faster and more ferocious than the one that ended up on Waking The Fallen, and longtime fans were delighted to see the original cut make a return on a special ‘Resurrected’ version of the album in 2014.
“WE BECAME MUCH BIGGER ASSHOLES AFTER BAT COUNTRY”
JOHNNY CHRIST