ARTISTdirect’s Editor-In-Chief Rick Florino spoke exclusively with M Shadows about writing “Carry On” for Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2, filming the motion capture work for Avenged Sevenfold’s appearance in the game, the appeal of playing Call Of Duty, writing the new album and the ‘cool direction’ it’s going in, what the front-man is currently listening to (DBN NOTE: Lana Del Rey’s “Born To Die” album (including the Paradise Edition) is incredible), keeping the writing process balanced, visual lyrics and more. You can read the entire interview here.

Has “Carry On” sparked the writing process even more?
- After “Carry On”, we took off August and most of September. At the end of September, we started writing for the record. I’m really happy with it. It’s a very cool direction that we’re going in. There’s kind of an old school feel, but it’s still modern. It doesn’t feel dated. It’s going to be the next evolution of Avenged Sevenfold. We’re excited about it.

On Nightmare, you balanced writing big hooks with the epic, expansive nature of the songs masterfully. Metallica’s one of the only other bands in history to do that. Is that balance between slamming choruses and progressive intricacy in mind?
- It’s totally in my mind. When you look at bands like Pantera, Megadeth, and Metallica, they’re way closer in their songwriting than you would think. They’re all the same sorts of riffs. You can tell the way they write songs is very AC/DC-based. Metallica gets a little more melodic. Pantera gets a little more brutal. Megadeth has more of those creepy, melodic minor types of scales. It’s riff-based. When you have a combination of that, which our band kind of does because we grew up on all those bands, you have to make sure there’s a balance between the aggressive and the melodic and the stripped-down songs and the songs that are more progressive. There’s always a balance. You have to weigh that balance on what the song needs and the album needs. At some point, you need to say, “We have a bunch of long songs, we need some compact songs”. At another point, you need to say, “Let’s make a fucking crazy eleven-minute song!” It comes to making what you want to hear.