The band has been categorized under several genres of heavy and extreme music, primarily heavy metal, alternative metal, hard rock, and, on their album "The Stage", progressive metal, with their earlier albums being categorized as metalcore. Avenged Sevenfold's musical style has consistently evolved throughout the duration of the band's career. Initially, the band's debut album "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" consisted almost entirely of a metalcore sound. However, there were several deviations from this genre, most notably in "Streets", which shows a punk rock style, and "Warmness on the Soul", which is a piano ballad. On "Waking the Fallen", the band displayed a metalcore style once more, but added more clean singing and leaned a bit more towards metal and bit less close to hardcore. In the band's DVD "All Excess", producer Andrew Murdock explained this transition: "When I met the band after "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" had come out before they had recorded "Waking the Fallen", M. Shadows said to me 'This record is screaming. The record we want to make is going to be half-screaming half-singing. I don't want to scream anymore. And the record after that is going to be all singing'."