Avenged Sevenfold unleashes pent up energy, new music at Kia Forum

Avenged Sevenfold fans waited a long time to see the Huntington Beach-based metal band play a gig near home.

“There are so many friends and family here … we probably know half of you,” vocalist M. Shadows told the sold-out crowd at Kia Forum in Inglewood Friday night after the quintet blasted through its 2007 hit “Afterlife.”

The arena concert marked A7X’s first proper headlining gig in Los Angeles County since 2009, but the band did headline Irvine Meadows at the Uproar Festival in its native Orange County in 2010. The band also played an intimate fan appreciation show at the Hollywood Palladium in 2013 in support of its “Hail to the King” album and in 2016 played a livestreaming show with a few lucky local fans in attendance atop the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles for the launch of its album “The Stage.”

A7X was scheduled to play Kia Forum for the first time back in 2018 on its End of the World Tour with supergroup Prophets of Rage, however the jaunt was cut short as Shadows contracted a viral infection that left him voiceless and he developed a blood blister on his vocal folds.

He sounded fantastic Friday night in Inglewood and the fans were definitely happy that the long wait to see the band perform live was over.

Before the show started, the house music warmed up the crowd. Tons of metal fans in black T-shirts weren’t too cool to dance along to “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot and a full on sing-along broke out during the Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way.” With those vocal cords ready to go, A7X hit the stage with “Game Over,” the first taste of its new record “Life is But a Dream …,” which dropped on June 2.

In all, the band slipped in seven new songs during its 17-song set on Friday. Though they’ve played a couple of festival gigs and a quick pop-up show in Las Vegas in the past two months, these are the first shows for the band since 2018. They really did mix the new in with the old tried and true, live debuting the song “Mattel” after the opening, but bringing old school fans back into the fold with “Afterlife” and “Hail to the King.”

As a whole, the new record has a running theme when listened to in order and in its entirety. Broken up into fragments for a live show there are a few standouts like “We Love You” and “Nobody,” but in the encore the band delivered three more new songs, “G,” “(O)rdinary” and “(D)eath.”

All three of the latter have their own distinct vibe, especially “(O)rdinary,” which sounds like something a composer scoring a movie in the ’80s would have dreamed the distant future of music to sound like. Fans did moan and groan a bit when the band exited the stage after a three-song encore and let the instrumental new title track, “Life is But a Dream …” play until the house lights came up.

But M. Shadows, guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance, bassist Johnny Christ and drummer Brooks Wackerman gave the fans plenty in between, ripping through “Buried Alive” and “The Stage” and pleasing its most loyal devotees with a little Easter egg in “Unholy Confessions” as they played it with the original chorus as the outro.

Since it was a family affair, M. Shadows shouted out to the family of the band’s original drummer Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan who died in 2009. The band dedicated “So Far Away” to Sullivan and fans lit up the arena with their cell phone flashlights and sang along. They also closed the main set with “A Little Piece of Heaven,” an eight-minute murder-and-revenged themed theatrical piece written and composed entirely by Sullivan that sounds a little like if Danny Elfman had gotten his hands on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Overall, the band was mighty throughout the evening, easily blending the old and the new and showing off skills on fan favorites like “Nightmare” and “Bat Country.” There’s something magical that happens when Gates and Vengeance meet on the stage and their fingers start flying on the guitar strings. The band very unapologetically allows their influences to shine through, from metal bands like Metallica, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden to punk acts like Black Flag and rock gods Guns ‘N Roses.

A7X will go on to headline several prominent rock festivals this year — including Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, in September and Aftershock in Sacramento in October. When the album was announced back in March the band only had two shows — the Kia Forum date and a gig at Madison Square Garden in New York on June 23 — but they’ve since revealed a full fledged North American tour that kicks off in July and eventually brings the band back to Southern California with a show at North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre in Chula Vista on Oct. 7.

Avenged Sevenfold

When: Friday, June 9

Where: Kia Forum, Inglewood