NEWS: Avenged Sevenfold prepare for Download with Belfast SSE show

SO you're not going to Download for a variety of reasons, but if you are a fan of Avenged Sevenfold don't despair, because their coming to Belfast.

The band and MCD have confirmed they will play the SSE Arena on June 6th - just two days prior to their Download headlining slot. Tickets go on sale this coming Friday - save your pennies!

As they say, here's the blurb:

When talking about Avenged Sevenfold impressive statistics always get a mention. These include a string of best-selling albums, among them two consecutive No. 1’s on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums Chart along with Diamond, Platinum and Gold awards for album sales in nearly a dozen countries and a series of No. 1 radio singles. But Avenged Sevenfold is a group whose career can't be summed up by simple number-crunching. More than fifteen years after the release of their debut album, Avenged Sevenfold has become a band whose sound and vision has broken through obstacles of language, distance and culture.

The Guardian recently described the group as the one metal band of their generation with genuine stadium-filling ability on both sides of the Atlantic. They’ve definitely proved themselves to be a monolithic concert draw, routinely selling out arenas worldwide & headlining some of the biggest and most prestigious music festivals around the globe including Download, Soundwave (Australia), Summer Sonic (Japan), Graspop (Belgium) and Rock on the Range (USA).

Their newest album is THE STAGE, which Guitar World called “the most surprising and ambitious album of their career.” Clocking in at 73 electrifying minutes, THE STAGE hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative, Rock and Hard Rock Album Charts and No. 1 on iTunes in 13 countries. Co-produced by the band and Joe Barresi (Queens of the Stone Age, Tool), the critically acclaimed album is a work of immense scope and ambition, featuring 11 panoramic tracks tied together by an Artificial Intelligence theme. Inspired by the writings of Carl Sagan and Elon Musk, the album is the band’s first thematic release. While the term “AI” conjures up images of robots and fantasy films, the band steers clear of a science fiction storyline. Instead, THE STAGE sees them taking a futurist’s look at the accelerated rate at which technology’s intelligence is expanding and what that means—good and bad—for the days ahead. Rolling Stone called it “the most aggressively bonkers music of the quintet’s career” and NME hailed the album as “their best yet.” The record’s epic 15-minute-plus closing track, “Exist,” features a guest appearance by award-winning astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson giving a spoken word performance he penned specifically for the album. All of which explains why The Guardian listened to the album and wrote, “the only reasonable response is to stand and applaud.”