Listen to Avenged Sevenfold’s Cover of the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’
Avenged Sevenfold's latest release is a cover of the Beach Boys 1966 classic "God Only Knows."
It's the latest in a series of single releases from the band, all meant to "evolve" their most recent full-length effort, 2016's The Stage. "God Only Knows" was preceded earlier this year by the Spanish-language track "Malaguena Salerosa" and covers of Mr. Bungle's "Retrovertigo" and Del Shannon's "Runaway."
As singer M. Shadows told Billboard earlier this year, the idea of an evolving album appeals to Avenged Sevenfold's fondness for "putting out music in a non-conventional way"; encouraged by the growing number of high-profile artists who've taken to releasing new projects through non-traditional avenues or without the usual amount of pre-release fanfare, they decided to add to The Stage after giving fans a chance to experience the original track listing for several months.
"You look at what Kendrick Lamar or Drake are doing, or any hip-hop or pop act. Their streaming numbers are through the roof," said Shadows. "And you look at rock, and they're just not there. But we want to get new stuff out to people. We don't have the answers to all the big questions in the music industry, but we do have control of keeping ourselves artistically satisfied, and this just seemed fun to us."
At the time of the Billboard interview, Shadows promised some unusual covers in store for fans, and the group has definitely delivered. "We always want to do covers, but we found it kind of boring to do covers of bands in our genre, and we were always asked to do those," he explained. "We said, 'What do we love?,' and everyone picked one song each and it came down to those are the songs we felt we wanted to cover."
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