“We should celebrate the things that already work.”

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Sometime in 2005, I was wandering through the CD aisles at Target with a $20 bill burning in my pocket. It was back when album art carried weight, and something about System of a Down’s Toxicity drew me in – despite having never heard of the band.

Back at home, the $20 reduced to change, I slipped the disc into my Walkman and listened wide-eyed to the entire record. It was heavy and dark, but catchy and dripping with social commentary. I was enthralled, and conflicted as to whether I should be enjoying something this musically sinister. But I got over that, quickly expanding to Tool, Slipknot, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones. And Avenged Sevenfold, too. 

That same year, the California band released their third LP, City of Evil, and I became obsessed with its single “Bat Country.” Before tiling into blitzing nu metal, the song opens with lead singer Matthew Sanders – better known as his stage name M. Shadows – uttering, “he who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

The quote belongs to English writer Samuel Johnson and can be found at the beginning of the film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Bat Country” itself was written largely in reference to the cult classic. “We can't stop here. This is bat country," says Raoul Duke – Thompson’s pseudonymous alter ego – to his companion Dr. Gonzo, tripping balls on some combination of LSD and ether while hallucinating bats and manta rays in the sky. 

In the song’s outro, Sanders again invokes Duke, singing operatically, “I'm too weird to live but much too rare to die,” which references: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Nearly two decades later Sanders is still reckoning with us mutants and beasts, navigating human nature and his own place in it. On June 2, Avenged Sevenfold released their first record – Life is But a Dream... – since 2016’s The Stage, a concept album that was oriented around big, philosophical questions.

After releasing The Stage, Sanders became consumed by those questions, fomenting a drug-fueled existential crisis of his own. He began reading Camus, exploring psychedelics like psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT (the potent compound found in some toad secretion), even hiring a shaman as a guide. “It flipped my world upside down,” he told me recently, “I didn't think I was gonna get through it. I would walk the streets and just think. But it was so dark.”

For a long while the singer tunneled through the mysteries of being, reckoning with the purpose of existence and the things that we build to give it flesh. Somewhere along the way he discovered crypto and the blockchain, soon becoming one of on-chain music’s most outspoken champions, and he found peace between the extremes, writing “a record based around the positivity of meaninglessness.”

Life is But a Dream... is a capricious meditation on living today – in the time of crypto, climate crisis and an infinity of ways in which we humans can chart our course. But for all we’ve built in this world, are we any better for it? And if we are, which are the bits that really matter? Sanders and I dove in together.

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Sanders got into crypto in 2016, buying popular coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin and hodling until 2020. His interest grew when his friend Joe Totaro told him about the non-fungible token (NFT) collections CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. Sanders started spending time in various Discords, interacting with early thinkers and playing with the unifying elements of the nascent profile picture (PFP) projects.

"That's when it hit me – you can use the blockchain to build a community or fan club,” he told me. “And then my mind started going crazy – what if royalties are on-chain? What if concert tickets are on-chain? What if merchandise is on-chain? I saw Bored Ape Yacht Club building something out of nothing,” he said. “So I go, what if we build something and we already have a whole fan base?” 

Read more: Medallion Plays the Long Game As It Creates a ‘Home Base’ for Musicians to Bring Artists and Fans Together

Sanders linked up with Totaro, who ended up building Bitflips, Avenged Sevenfold’s now web3 tech partner. In December 2021, the band launched their own NFT collection called Deathbats Club, designed to function as the connective tissue for the band’s still evolving on-chain blueprint.

Those plans continue to gain contours. This past March, the band partnered with Ticketmaster to provide token-gated priority access to tickets for the Deathbats Club. A few weeks later, Avenged Sevenfold launched TicketPass, their own blockchain-based verification and rewards system, which allows the band to honor their community for various acts of support.

The band then affixed every piece of physical merchandise – including vinyl – around Life is But a Dream... with a near-field communication (NFC) chip – the same communications protocol that powers Apple Pay and Google Pay. Scanning the chip grants access to exclusive footage, offers authenticity and rarity information about the item and can be used to redeem an NFT.

Coupled with TicketPass, that’s a powerful combination – Sanders likened it to an airline rewards program – as the band can connect actions to an on-chain token that evolves as each fan engages in various ways. 

“TicketPass is supposed to be a reward for people who are doing things anyways,” Sanders said. “I think the smartest thing we did in the beginning was two things: we were able to block marketplaces to protect the royalties, and we were able to only sell to real fans, not NFT flippers,” he said. “We were selling to people who had no clue what this was, but they wanted to be involved.”

“It created a very healthy sentiment right off the bat,” he continued. “You're not gonna sit in our Discord and ask us what we're doing next. You're not gonna try to tell us what our token's worth. This is gonna be something that, if you're a fan, it's essential. And if you're not, then you don't want this token because we're just gonna disappoint you.”

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Smartly, Avenged Sevenfold are rewarding prevailing behavior rather than incentivizing artificial scarcity to encourage new behavior. The blockchain “is a step in the right direction,” Sanders said, but its emergence doesn’t eradicate the value of what already exists, nor does it suddenly alter the ways in which people behave. “We should celebrate the things that already work,” he said. “The thing about technology – there's this period when the dust settles where you realize you can have both, right?” 

But we always keep building, oftentimes not waiting for the dust to settle – and that’s a key theme in Life is But a Dream…. 

In the refrain of the song “We Love You,” Sanders chants:

“More power, more pace

More money, more taste

More sex, more pills

More skin, more shills

Build tall, build higher

Build far, build wider

Build here, build down

Build up, build now”

“That song's tongue-in-cheek,” Sanders told me, “like, ‘oh, you're so great, this world is so beautiful,’ and then we immediately throw you into the human rat race.” And for some reason we just keep racing – maybe because it’s easier to distract ourselves than face the prospect of meaninglessness.

In “Mattel” – my favorite track off the record – Sanders’ lyrics confront that proverbial glossing over – the ways in which our “vinyl skin…holds in place my plastic bones,” where “all seems as it should, but there's nobody home.” 

It’s a sleepwalk through self-deluded comfort, but in the refrain, we wake up: “But I've smelled the plastic daisies,” Sanders sings, “And it seems we've found ourselves in hell.”

So are we living or dying or dreaming? Are any of the daisies real? It’s a cluttered vastitude that Life is But a Dream... portrays through a wild amalgam of sound – imagine the nexus of a Soundgarden, Meatloaf and Dream Theater love triangle during a heavy-dose mushroom trip. 

Read more: How Music NFTs Are Different and Can Help Musicians Connect to Their Fans With Decent Protocol’s Charlie Durbin

“The record is bold, musically – that's one thing I wanted to do,” Sanders said. “It's also very existential and it deals with a lot of deep, dark, weighty subject matter, but also I hope people find beauty in it, because these are fundamental truths of our existence.”

Because at that fundamental level, even in the face of meaninglessness, we are united. For Sanders, that’s where the positivity lies. It’s “positivity I could find out of not being handed a set of rules, but to be able to create your own,” he said, and “the positive reinforcement of being one with every other human being and understanding that we all have these little things about us.”

The record seeks to account for all of those little things, getting the “Bohemian Rhapsody” treatment that a fiend for formula might deem untenable: sudden shifts in texture, tempo, vocal styles and mood – a reflection of our own mighty discontent, where “nothing really matters at all” – as Freddie Mercury famously crooned. And yet at the same time, it highlights this moment of unprecedented import. 

“If you look at certain metrics, the world is a much better place to live in now than it was, but there's more depression and other things that are happening because of the tools that we've made,” Sanders said.

If only we took time to let the dust settle. “We should be solving problems that allow people to live their life more. But we don't do that. We just stay inside the box and we're on the Internet all day,” Sanders said. “With quicker communication, it should be freeing us up to do other things. More leisure. Go for a walk outside, go on a run, take my dog for a walk. Instead, we just sit on there all day and we're like, ‘what's going on?’ It's very human of us. And that's why people need psychedelics.”

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In his book Food of the Gods, the seminal psychonaut Terrence McKenna weaves interconnected histories that tie together the emergence of consciousness, human behavior and the use of mind-altering substances – namely psychedelics. And he highlights the value and burden of seeking “the way.”

"The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns,” he writes. “Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found."

It seems clear that Sanders has journeyed into “the other,” and has come back with something to share. Meanwhile we mutants and beasts, too weird to live and too rare to die, keep building to remind ourselves that we’re here – to manufacture purpose, on and off of blockchains. But maybe it doesn’t matter, and maybe there’s bliss in finding a “way” where we can all not matter together, at least for a short while.

“Wes Lang, who did the art on [the record] gave me a great quote,” Sanders said. “He said my job is to tap people on the shoulder and let them know death is always looming. And you know, death is always looming. And this art is a reminder to them that you better act accordingly. Do the things you want to do, now – live in the moment. Because it's not gonna last for very long.”