AVENGED SEVENFOLD 'Not Really Thinking About' Next Album Yet

It's been just over a year since AVENGED SEVENFOLD released its fifth album, "Nightmare", and the band can see the end of the touring and promotional cycle for it approaching sometime in the first half of 2012. But singer M. Shadows told The Pulse Of Radio that making a follow-up to the group's first No. 1 disc is the furthest thing from their minds right now. "We're not really thinking about it," he said. "I think bands burn themselves out. I mean, look what happened to DISTURBED. You get caught up in the 'do a record, tour for two years, do a record, tour for two years.' We just need to make sure everybody's mentally in the right spot before we start writing and doing a new record. Right now, I think we're gonna tour, go back to Europe in February, maybe finish up with a couple of things in Europe in the summer, and then take six, seven months and just sit around. If we decide to write, we will, if we decide not to, we won't."

DISTURBED announced earlier this month that it was going on "indefinite hiatus" after five studio albums and more than a decade on the road.

AVENGED bassist Johnny Christ admitted in a recent interview that writing the band's next album without late drummer James "The Rev" Sullivan is going to be "a very different process without having Jimmy around."

Sullivan, who died from an overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol in December 2009, was a major songwriting force in AVENGED SEVENFOLD.

The band's current drummer is Arin Ilejay, who began playing with them earlier this year.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD has been overseas for most of this summer but is now home to headline the Rockstar Uproar Festival tour, which kicks off on Friday (August 26) in Camden, New Jersey.