M. Shadows — Matthew Sanders, born in Huntington Beach, California, in 1981 — is Avenged Sevenfold's singer and co-founder, and his voice changed in nature mid-career for medical reasons. On the first two albums, Sounding the Seventh Trumpet (2001) and Waking the Fallen (2003), he sang in the language of metalcore: guttural screams alternating with clean choruses. In 2004 he had to undergo vocal cord surgery and spent weeks forbidden to speak. When he returned, he had lost the ability to sustain that kind of delivery, and rebuilt his technique in another direction — a rough but pitched singing, gravelly in timbre and melodic in range. City of Evil (2005) is the result of that change, and is also the record that took the band out of the hardcore circuit and into arenas. The reinvention was decisive. Without it, Avenged Sevenfold would probably have remained one more name in the 2000s Californian scene; with it, the band became one of the last heavy rock acts to reach stadium scale. Beyond the microphone, Shadows drives the group's creative and commercial decisions, and it was he who steered the changes of direction on the later records, from Hail to the King (2013) to The Stage (2016) and Life Is But a Dream... (2023).
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