Avenged Sevenfold mistakenly announces show cancellations due to apparent deepfake hack

Avenged Sevenfold mistakenly told fans that several of their upcoming festival performances had been canceled due to an apparent deepfake hack.

According to Metal Injection, the latest episode of A7X’s Trax podcast featured someone who sure sounded like frontman M. Shadows sharing that the group would no longer be headlining Welcome to Rockville and Sonic Temple festivals. However, that was quickly refuted by Shadows on Twitter, who wrote, “Yikes! This is NOT TRUE.”

“We are still playing,” he said. “Getting to the bottom of this.”

Shadows then put out another tweet reading, “Literally walking in the streets of Mexico and listening to this [podcast]. What the actual f***…NOT ME!”

While it seems that someone could’ve used deepfake technology to impersonate Shadows and announce the false cancellations, this is the music industry in the year 2023 and some are theorizing that all this is actually an elaborate lead-up to the next Avenged Sevenfold album. You may recall that the band’s last album, 2016’s The Stage, was all about artificial intelligence, and A7X even promoted the record by leaking a fake title.

One thing we know for sure is that Avenged Sevenfold is still on track to play at Welcome to Rockville and Sonic Temple. Otherwise, stay tuned.

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