After years of voting online, the Loudwire Music Awards has expanded in 2017 to include a full live award ceremony filled with concert performances that will take place next Tuesday (Oct. 24) at the Novo in downtown Los Angeles, and heading up the performance lineup will be Avenged Sevenfold.

Loudwire Nights host Toni Gonzalez recently had a chance to speak with Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows about the importance of having a ceremony to celebrate rock and metal and what it means to the genre.

“We have nothing else," states the singer. "It’s pretty sad that they’ll give metal bands Grammys, but they won’t put us on TV. And if you look at things like the Billboard Awards or most other award shows, metal and rock are completely disregarded and bad examples of non-rock bands take our place."

He continues, "Whether it’s System of a Down or Disturbed or Avenged Sevenfold or Slipknot or whatever, these bands get no mainstream exposure, so that’s why I think it’s important that we go do our own thing and not really worry about what the mainstream is doing."

Speaking about what having an event honoring the genre means, Shadows adds, "It sure would be nice if people would start paying attention to those bands because a lot of kids growing up, they need things like that. They need heavy metal. There’s intelligent lyrics a lot of the time, there’s a lot of cool ideas and there’s a lot of classical influence in metal music. So I think it’s important that we stick together and make the genre as strong as possible even when the mainstream completely ignores us.”

Avenged Sevenfold are nominated for Metal Artist of the Year, Metal Album of the Year (for The Stage) and in the Best Guitarist(s) category where Synsyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance are up for the Hand of Doom trophy. You can find out if they win by attending the 2017 Loudwire Music Awards, taking place Oct. 24 at the Novo in downtown Los Angeles. For those in the area, ticketing info can be found here. You can also catch the festivities via AXS TV starting at 7PM PT and online streaming via the Loudwire Facebook account, the WWE Facebook account and the Facebook accounts of host Chris Jericho and wrestling superstar The Miz.

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