One of the best ways to get ready for your own headlining tour is to open for Metallica. It’s also one of the best gigs you’ll ever have in your life. And while Avenged Sevenfold are currently direct support for Metallica, it’s not like they’ve never played with them before. In fact, last August, the current tour did a dry run of sorts by christening Minneapolis’ U.S. Bank Stadium, and they also played with the band in Atlantic City for the first Orion Fest. It looks like the band will get a chance to test out more material from last year’s The Stage soon, however, as M. Shadows gave an update when being interviewed by a radio station in Wisconsin.

“January, February 2018. We will announce probably after the Metallica tour. That tour was supposed to happen this summer until we got that call from Metallica, so we decided put it on hold.”

“It was actually a little bit of a tough decision, because we had just paid for the whole stage to get built, and that was a lot of money to build that stage set. And we were able to use it in Europe and in the UK, but it is by no means paid off. So the whole idea was to go and take it throughout America, but then we got the call from Lars, and it was, like, ‘We can’t pass that up.’

“It’s just too big of a tour, it’ll be too much fun. It’s too good for the rock fan; the rock fans are gonna love that tour. So we basically had to say, ‘Okay, we’re just gonna put the stage in storage for a year and come back to it.’ And hopefully that will all work out for us.”

Despite the band’s lukewarm sales of The Stage, they’re still one of the biggest bands in metal, and opening for Metallica couldn’t have been so bad for raising their awareness. It’ll be interesting to see who this tour does, and how bit the venues they play will be. 

[via theprp]