Avenged Sevenfold have revealed they’ve been using the coronavirus-enforced lockdown period to “meticulously work on music” for their next album.

The Californian band last released a full-length record in 2016 with ‘The Stage’, and yesterday (October 7) shed some light on its long-awaited follow-up in a newsletter to fans.

Reflecting on the “unprecedented times” we’re currently living in, Avenged Sevenfold explained that the extra downtime had taught them “a lot about the fragility of being a human being and how quickly the world in which we took for granted could be flipped upside down”.

“For us, we have taken an inward approach. Spending large amounts of time with our families has been the silver lining,” the group said. “It has also given us the time to meticulously work on music and other projects.

“The truth though, is that it has been incredibly hard to record the way we want,” they added, going on to address the setbacks caused by the COVID-19 restrictions.

“We are not willing to sacrifice the sound we are going for to work around this. We will wait. There are other issues on the horizon but we are documenting it all for a later release when we can tell the whole story.

“At the end of the day it wouldn’t matter anyway. We don’t feel comfortable working on an album this long and then releasing it with no tour in sight. Part of the music we make needs to be expressed through live interaction.”

Avenged Sevenfold went on to say that they’re not prepared to promote their new record with live-streams or other virtual events, as this “just isn’t the way we are choosing to roll this thing out”.

Despite these issues, however, the band said they feel “recharged and stronger than ever as a unit”, adding that “the music will come when it comes”.