Avenged Sevenfold: Waking the Fallen (2LP, 20th anniversary edition, gold vinyl) [HOPELESS]

Why you'll love it

This 20th anniversary edition spreads the album across a 2LP set on gold vinyl, limited to 11,000 copies. Waking the Fallen went platinum in the US and gold in Canada and the UK, and Metal Hammer ranked it No. 6 among the 100 greatest albums of the 21st century.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Gold vinyl
• 20th anniversary edition
• Limited to 11,000 copies
• Pressed in the Czech Republic

About the album

The first week of Waking the Fallen sold about 3,000 copies. Six years later it went gold, and these days it sits at platinum in the US, which tells you how word of mouth works in metal: slowly, then all at once. It was Avenged Sevenfold's second album for Hopeless Records and the first with lead guitarist Synyster Gates and bassist Johnny Christ.

Gates and Zacky Vengeance turned the band into a twin-guitar machine, trading harmonized leads and solos over M. Shadows' mix of screams and melodic hooks. "Unholy Confessions" is the anthem, "Chapter Four" digs into old-school riffage, "Eternal Rest" landed on Kerrang!'s list of 666 songs you must own and on the Saw IV soundtrack, and the two-part "I Won't See You Tonight" stretches into a long, aching epic.

Revolver said this is where the band became a capital-M metal band, and Loudwire put it among the top 25 metalcore albums of all time. Kerrang! settling on 666 songs you must own, rather than a round 600, is the sort of attention to detail metal does best.

Also at Kops: more Avenged Sevenfold on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Hopeless (cat# HR671-1), a reissue of the 2003 album.