Avenged Sevenfold’s Synyster Gates Talks India Debut and ‘Life Is But A Dream’

By his own admission, Synyster Gates did himself no favors on his first night in India when he ended up trying some Indian gin. The guitarist for California-origin metallers Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) checked into Bengaluru just a couple of days ahead of their debut show in the country, headlining day one of Bandland festival on Nov. 23, 2024.

Dressed like he’s straight out of the West Coast, Gates aka Brian Haner Jr. walks into the meeting room in camo pants, a black t-shirt under the leopard print jacket that he’s paired with glasses that also have a leopard print pattern on the rim. A slight smirk from the guitarist, entrepreneur and occasional fashion designer tells us he’s having a good time in India so far. He says about his gin selection from last night, “I was trying to figure out which one it was so I can sound smart and cultured, but I don’t remember what it was, but it’s really good. We drank a lot, so I’m on my best behavior tonight, gotta feel great for tomorrow.”

Bandland – the rock and metal festival now in its second edition and is promoted and presented by BookMyShow Live – called on A7X to headline day one, which Gates says was the first time they ever got an offer from India. If you’d ask any of the thousands of fans who’ll gather tonight to hear their arena-ready, they’ll say it’s about damn time. After all, Avenged Sevenfold have spent the last 25 years churning out grandiose songs ranging from “Nightmare” to “Afterlife,” fist-tight tunes like “Bat Country” and more recent songs like “The Stage” (the title track from their 2016 concept album that was a timely yet futuristic take on artificial intelligence and self-destruction of society) and “Nobody” from the 2023 album Life Is But a Dream… They’ve earned a Grammy nomination for “The Stage” and conquered arenas around the world before they’ve finally come to India. Even now, there’s an insatiable need for the band to push forward, into new avenues – whether it’s blockchain (or more obviously) new music.

In an interview with Rolling Stone India, Gates talks about the visit, what’s in store for their performance and the making of their recent album. Excerpts:

Rolling Stone India: How has your time in India been so far? Have you had offers come your way for India before?

Synyster Gates: For us, it’s kind of been radio silence. We were very pleasantly surprised when the offer came through. And we have an amazing international booking agency at this point, just crushing it for us. So to get an offer from Rock In Rio, which we just did, which was a massive success, and this one, it really feels like we’re stepping in, into that next level, worldwide. We’re very excited to be here. Yeah.

Are there any other new territories apart from India that you’ve visited on this album cycle for Life Is But A Dream…?

Let’s see… new territories, not really. We have some amazing plans to hit up Eastern Europe next year, places that we haven’t been, but revisiting older things with fresh plans of attack, like Indonesia was amazing for us earlier this year. Some familiar faces, but in a new, rebranded fresh way. So it’s been really exciting. But this [India] is a first, as far as new territories, and it’s a really, completely brand new culture shock to our system, which is fucking wonderful.

I read about the intense inspirations for this album, existential crises and stuff. How do you get on the same page as a band about stuff like that?

Well, I’m not having an existential crisis, just yet [laughs]. Shadows [vocalist] he’s doing really good. Lyrics have kind of always been his department, and I think over the years, especially when they become more exciting, like when they’re like historical or biblical references, I was really impressed by how we paint a picture and kind of reinvent some of those old classic stories, but it was never… it didn’t invoke incredible passion with me, I feel like when Jimmy passed away, [drummer] The Rev passed away [in 2009], that’s when he [Shadows] started being able to really dig deep and get to the core emotion of a story. And he really started to speak really deeply. It’s very, very emotive.

And then, as you know, we became fucking crypto degenerates in like 2016, we kind of focused on a bunch of different technologies. At that point, AI was starting to kind of turn the corner, and it’s huge now, but we’re kind of focused on stuff like that. VR, how gaming was kind of taking flight and connecting the world really gigantic fucking entertainment industry, I believe it to be the biggest. And those things are just exciting. So when we wanted to reshape the lyrical landscape with those things in mind, everybody just gravitated to that.

For me, musically, I really just, never wanted to feel behind the eight ball. I wanted to explore really unique places. Technology has advanced so much musically that in my home studio, I can do a demo that sounds like, I mean, it’d be hard-pressed for a fan to like, hear the difference. It sounds incredible. Now my producer, Joe Barresi would fucking kill me, saying it’s absolutely inherently different to us and certainly to him. So we spent a lot of time bringing that high level of fidelity back. But it just seems like that marriage of that avant-garde tech-ish [elements]. Like, Multi-planetary explorations and stuff like that, kind of mixed in with his existential crises. It feels really good. We’re just very lucky to answer your question directly, for everybody to come on board so naturally and evolve kind of the same the same way is, incredible fucking dumb luck.

There’s of course a familiarity in the experimentation of Life Is But A Dream. What would you say was the most experimental thing you did? Was it “Easier”? The piano stuff on the title track?

It was incredibly difficult. If you’re a musician at all, or even, I think even a general listener can tell that it’s very layered and unique-sounding record. And for us to get there took a lot of checks and balances, and we’re again, very fortunate to have an amazing band of brothers on the same page. And so when somebody tells me, you know, a song that I wrote fucking sucks, and I have to tell them that a song he wrote fucking sucks – not in those kind of words – but we just know after, 25 years, that it’s going to be right. And I’ve never listened to a demo of a song that everybody didn’t like that maybe I wrote, or thought, “Damn, we really missed an opportunity to have that on the record.” It’s never been that. So at this point, it’s just like, “Let’s go fast. Tell me if it sucks, let’s fucking let’s get it right.”

Was there anything specific you could tell me about the album’s experiments that you felt was really out there?

Just exploring with all the layers. We played a lot of crazy instruments on this record, and so getting into the studio and having a Mellotron dropped off, or, I mean, we invented a harmonica. That’s not like it was that crazy of an invention. We just had to add two more lower notes to a bass harmonica that took a while to even just have built, and then playing those things on the record, was a lot of fun.

But you know, we’re not these multi-hyphenate-style instrumentalists that can jam through anything. It takes lots of patience, but where we’re at now, we had a lot of fun with it. It’s not like “This has to be done now. We only have a week.” We took our fucking sweet time. Took us, like, six years to do this record, and we just had fun. We had young kids, so we took time off here. COVID happened, and so we took a lot of time off there, and just finally, kind of pieced this thing together. It was a big journey.

On your Instagram, you spoke about being inspired by Kanye West’s Jeen-Yuhs docu-series.

To pull the curtain back a little bit, I’ve always said if Kanye makes another record, then so can we. It’s so inspiring, the stuff that he does. It’s way more unique and creative. I think he blows his contemporaries away with that type of stuff. We really adopted very diverse soundscapes, very dynamic soundscapes, where, at the turn of a dime, it goes into something completely unique [in a song]. But for us, it has to feel like it’s seamless. Maybe for most people, they’re just like, “What the fuck e are these guys doing? How much drugs did they take?” But for us, we’re just really inspired by doing things differently like that.

So yeah, Kanye, just even when he speaks about… he did, I think, it was Joe Rogan. He’d just go off on these little words salad tangents. He says, “Nobody knows what I’m saying, then I try my best to circle back and make it all make sense.” I think that resonated so much with me, because I, as you can clearly tell, I fucking just go off on crazy tangents, hopefully trying to bring it back. But I, I always felt that that was kind of maybe wrong, but you have to lean into who you are, and it’s maybe not giving me the courage to do that shit anyway. But it was like, “Okay, I totally understand that.” That is the same way musically, going up on tangents, and somehow try to make the symphony work.

A7X is a quintessential American band…

[Laughs] We’re white as fuck!

And you’re the kind of heavy music we saw embraced by radio, stadiums and everything. What is it like being in that highly competitive space? Does it feel like a competition?

To me, it’s just been freeing. We’re very fortunate. We were kind of one of the last bands, last rock bands, probably the last rock band to really have help with a major label when it mattered, in the early 2000s and now it’s just feeling free, knowing that you’re on an island, knowing that terrestrial radio isn’t really a thing. You don’t need to cater to anything. It’s literally just about doing what you want to do, and if you love it. It includes a live show, includes an interview.

I don’t do many interviews. I hope there’s some expansion that comes from it, but I don’t really expect it. It just is what it is. But it’s kind of fun to hang out, so we’re doing it. And we’re doing it in a brand new place, right? It’s exciting.

But the most important thing is you just make the music that touches you, touches your brothers, and they feel the same way, and you do that in a myriad of ways. Being a band like us, you can do it with unique ways of doing a music video – still motion or doing a VR concert – just things that are really inspiring, they’re exciting. They feel like they’re especially for me, cutting edge technology, it’s way more exciting. There’s so much of that shit to do. The last thing I want to do is plug into an amp or a big ol’ fucking classic stack and start writing regurgitated Avenged Sevenfold riffs, Metallica riffs. It’s just been done, and I can’t. None of us can do that anymore. The same thing goes with music videos, production for live shows. It has to feel fresh, it has to be unique, and hopefully, it’ll blow away the audience.

You also have your own brand identity, with like a logo and got into designing merch and guitar gear stuff of course. Treating an artist as a brand is like musicianship 101 these days. Were you thinking about it back when you started out? What do you think about it now?

Yeah, we definitely do. We should lean into that more. I think we do it enough, and it’s natural. I experimented with wearing all my own clothes, like all that kind of shit, and making them. When you just can’t make anything that unique, and it’s tough, it’s not inspiring. And I do want to lean in more to my personal clothing brand – getting somebody out of college that does cut and sew and saying, “Here’s 50 percent of the Empire, make things that I love and I want to wear unique, limited edition shit. And we’ll see where it happens.

If I do that, then I’d be excited to rebrand. But things like my educational community, that’s for them to do. I kind of keep out of it, to be honest, it’s a UGC (user-generated content) platform, and it’s there for people who have more time to try and explain what I’m doing and how I learned, as well as how they’re learning. That’s the way to do it.

But for me to take time from two young kids and a ton of businesses and stuff, even with just Avenged that’s a full-time job to manage… all those different things, I can’t do it so, so it’s finding the right way of doing things. And if it’s inspiring and I love it, I know other people will be inspired and love it as well.

The way things develop in the music industry, over time, there have always been phases like Hot Topic and all those things, that bands have been perceived in pop culture. Were there trends you just didn’t feel worked for you? You were saying, ‘Okay, I’ll let that one go.’

They’re all stupid. You look back and you’re like, “That was stupid, that was stupid, that was stupid.” And then, hopefully you have your days where you’re just like, “That’s cool, that we smeared lipstick across our face and eyeliner and grills” and all that kind of stuff there. I think the crazier that we looked, that’s more proud than… early 2000s we were all in the same Hot Topic shirts and black pants and shit and dyed black hair. That kind of Gothic, homogenous sort of look… but we were 20 years old, you know? It is what it is. I’m proud that we came from that and continue to explore and evolve, and always have that mindset that we’re trying to be in front of the eight ball, not behind it. And I think that we’ve succeeded many times in our history. I’m very proud of that.

A7X have a tech-heavy stage production that you’re bringing to India. What can you tell me about it?

It’s very modern. There are elements of AI, which I think many people aren’t doing live AI-generated content right now. Boiling it down to more of an amazing kind of light, tech-driven show, rather than, “All right, here we come. We’re fucking old-school metal band. Here’s all the fire in the world.”

It’s one of those things that feels new and fresh, and to be able to utilize amazing backdrops and have the technology evolve so that each song has its own identity, and you’re just literally transported into a ton of different worlds as each song passes by, with hopefully some sort of seamlessness tied in. I doubt that there is, but we try and it just makes it more exciting for us, right?

What’s in store in terms of the setlist?

Spend all the money. You gotta make it cool. You can’t come over here, thinking it’s really expensive to travel. It’s only one show. We tried to book some other shows to kind of subsidize this big event here, and we couldn’t do it.

So none of us are making money, and we’re okay with it, you know, because we know at the end of the day, we’re putting on the same show. We’re all on islands, but you can see what’s happening through YouTube, social media and shit. So even if we did try to skim a little off the top, which we would never and have never done, it would be so disingenuous, and people would sniff it out like that. They’d say, “You’ve never been here. We don’t know if you’re ever coming back, but you gave us a shitty show. Why did you do that?” Yeah, we’d never do that. So it’s going to be the full monty. We’re excited. It is a festival, so it’s not like you get all of it, you have to share with others, but it’s not like we’re cheapening this one as opposed to another one we did. It’s, We’re very, very proud of the production we’re doing.

Your songs and albums sometimes conjure up a musical. Do you think we’d see A7X on Broadway now that we’ve got Green Day and stuff?

Nobody offers to do shit for us. [Laughs] No collaborations, no shoe endorsements, none of that stuff. We have to kind of beg, borrow and steal to get to the unique type of events or opportunities that we’ve done.

Our management is absolutely incredible, though. Like the VR thing, they sought after it. You just have an amazing team. Even Warner Bros right now, has worked tirelessly to get us certain opportunities, and I think they kind of spearheaded the VR thing as well. It’s a blessing to have an amazing team, and that’s the biggest thing for us right now – is team building. Everything is still fucking fresh. We can do anything.

You’d like to see it, though?A7X on Broadway, maybe?

Yeah, I’d do it. Book me. I’ll sing and dance.

It’s gonna be 20 years of City of Evil in 2025. Anything special there? People usually now get asked to do an anniversary tour or special album set. What are your thoughts on that?

We did something for our Deathbats Club. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. It’s a really cool fan club that’s on the blockchain, and all the rewards and stuff come directly from the blockchain. It’s an amazing technology. The NFT cycle just completely plummeted and from the remains rose this really wonderful way to reward fans and spend time with them.

We had a really small show where we did all old-school songs and kind of dressed up like half-wits. It was a lot of fun. But I know some bands are making an entire cycle out of that [album anniversary sets], that it’s cool, but it doesn’t really interest us. We’re just kind of constantly trying to pound the pavement, in hopes of finding new, unique, fresh ways of presenting and creating music.