- The last Revolver Golden Gods Awards I think you guys stole like every freaking trophy that there was to win. What made you dominate that award ceremony?ZV: Man, you know, we just have incredible fans and it was a huge honor to win those awards because a year before that after we lost The Rev we were sitting at that award show watching his family accepting an award on The Rev’s behalf. We were just wondering if we’d ever be a band again so to come back one year later and win all of the awards.. It was a huge triumph for not just us but for our fans and our family that we’ve grown with so it was amazing.
- The first question might seem a little generic for you, man. I want you to describe what are the characteristics of Avenged Sevenfold’s sound ’cause to me it seems like you’ve got a proper style of shredding guitars. To you what is, what makes A7X’s sound?ZV: I think we take a lot of pride in trying to always have as much energy as we can. Keep the songs as energetic as possible. The songs that are slower, you know, we really try and create a dynamic. The songs that are energetic are going to be the most energetic. The songs that are slower, definitely, we want to bring down the mood a lot. We have fun up there playing. We always like playing fast guitar, the drums fast, we have lots of vocals. We grew up listening to heavy metal. I think a lot of our style comes from having grown up listening to a lot of punk rock also, classic rock, I mean we’re fans of everything so we incorporate everything and it’s made for like a big really eclectic heavy metal type band.
- Are you a video game player?ZV: Yeah I play a little bit.
- I am myself. Here’s my question – Do you think that for a band to get a song featured in a video game that’s a good idea? Let me explain my point. Your song “Bat Country” is featured in the NHL 06 video game. I own that video game at home. Now it’s like to me “Bat Country” is a cursed song ’cause every time that I hear it on the radio I see either a menu layout or a picture of the Quebec Nordiques winning the Stanley Cup. So do you think that’s a good idea, for a song to be burned that way or cursed by a video game?ZV: [Laughing] I think people have a lot of fun with it. We just did a song for Call Of Duty, the Black Ops game and it’s kind of cursed for me because I can’t win ever since we made the song for it. But it’s a lot of fun. We all grew up playing video games and stuff so any time you hear your song anywhere you know that kids get a, new kids get a chance to hear it it’s always exciting for us. But, try not to make it too cursed.
- Now onto the nickname gimmick for the band. I’ve asked a similar question to Hollywood Undead with the mask gimmick. What gave you confidence that in 2011 that the nickname gimmick would be still relevant for a metal band?ZV: You know we originally did it because we come from Orange County and kind of came up in the Hardcore scene and nobody would even dare come up with fake names and all the people, you know, we grew up listening to like Axel Rose and Slash and we just, we loved that, you know, the theatrical element of that. Made it a little larger than life. So we started from the very beginning with our names and they’ve grown with us and it’s fun, you know? People hated it at first and some people still hate it but our fans love it. So, I think it was just us being ourselves and having fun with it.
- The last Revolver Golden Gods Awards I think you guys stole like every freaking trophy that there was to win. What made you dominate that award ceremony?ZV: Man, you know, we just have incredible fans and it was a huge honor to win those awards because a year before that after we lost The Rev we were sitting at that award show watching his family accepting an award on The Rev’s behalf. We were just wondering if we’d ever be a band again so to come back one year later and win all of the awards.. It was a huge triumph for not just us but for our fans and our family that we’ve grown with so it was amazing.
- Now you’re playing Quebec at the Summer Festival. What’s left for Avenged Sevenfold to play? Have you played Download, Ozzfest, maybe another Woodstock? What’s left on the check-list?ZV: Man, we’ve done a lot. We’ve been busy but we’re going to stay busy. It’s a big world and we’ve got fans all over it so we’re going to keep touring. We’ll be coming back through for the Uproar tour again which is a huge honor because we did it last year and uh you know they asked us to come back which is amazing. Yeah we’re just gonna stay busy, keep touring and then hopefully in the not too distant future make some new music. Just staying busy.
(grazie a deathbatnews.com