How Avenged Sevenfold Dominated MTV's program Total Request Live (TRL)

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When I think of the late 90’s/2000/2010’s MTV Show Total Request live or TRL, the first thing that comes to my mind is teeny bopper pop music. -backstreet boys, nysync, britney spears But the show would also feature some heavier acts as well including limp bizkit, korn and today’s topic Avenged Sevenfold.
In 2005 an up and coming band named Avenged Sevenfold appeared on TRL. The band were promoting their breakout third record City of Evil, which was helped by the single Bat Country which got considerable radio airplay Helping boost their profile was an appearance on the Vans Warped Tour. But it wasn’t an easy climb. In fact M. Shadows would appear on the Tuna on Toast Podcast with Stryker and reveal that existing fans of the band who loved the group’s previous record 2003’s Waking the Fallen were disappointed with City of Evil with him recalling “our fans on waking the fallen were very bummed on it. They were like this isn’t waking the fallen 2, this isn’t screaming and singing. This is all singing. Matt’s voice has changed, they’re doing much more solos, much more over the top” Adding insult to injury was that the album was a total failure out of the gate. It appeared in the upper echelons of the billboard charts but quickly fell off and was moving about 2-3000 copies a week which at that time was a total failure according to M Shadows. The band soon hit the warped tour and Avenged Sevenfold’s saving grace would be their buddies on the warped tour, Good Charlotte. M Shadows would recall on the podcast They (Good Charlotte) said, ‘We get to bring on an artist that we want,’ and they brought on Avenged Sevenfold. They played our video and it never left TRL after that. And it went all the way to No. 1. And then we ended up winning video music of the year (Best New Artist). It really was because Benji and Joel saw something, Good Charlotte saw something that no one else saw, and they took us on there and it had a mainstream audience. The video was killer, the song worked, and then all of a sudden everything just started going. It was like, here we go.”
But the decision to do the show wasn’t an easy one for Avenged Sevenfold. M Shadows would tell Revolver "It was a decision-making process," S"It wasn't just, oh, you guys are playing TRL. They asked us and we dogged on it for a while, because for a metal band it's a dangerous thing sometimes." "Kids voted us to the top of the countdown. They obviously wanted to see us, [we] wanted to show the world we could play our instruments and do our thing," he explained. "So we decided to do it."
The band would appear on the show performing two songs: Bat Country and The Beast and the Harlot. That appearance helped the band push sales of City of Evil past 560,000 copies. But the band wanted to shake off the perception of being a teeny bopper band just for appearing on TRL with M Shadows telling MTV after their appearance. "When you go to our live show, it's a full-on heavy metal show, and we don't need -- I mean, no offense to 10-year-old and 11-year-old little girls, [but] they're not going to understand the experience," This led the band to releasing beast and the harlot as the second single with m shadows adding to mtv. "With 'Beast and the Harlot,' we wanted kids to know that this record isn't driven towards 'TRL,' " Shadows said. "It's a rock record. This is what Avenged Sevenfold is about. It's not a radio-driven band. This next single's more for the fans, more for the kids that get the record, and get the whole record -- not just the poppy chorus and the Hunter S. Thompson thing, and that's all we care about this band for. The quicker you can get rid of those people, the better. I think going with 'Beast' was more of us trying to solidify our career and not throw it down the drain by being in a bunch of teeny magazines. We don't belong there. That kind of scared us a bit, and I think it's smart to push back and deliver a real rock single next."
The clip for the first single, "Bat Country," would spend more than a week as the "TRL" audience's top pick. On top of that at the 2006 mtv video music awards avenged sevenfold won the award for best new artist in a video for bat country.