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…
Read the full article here
