Songfacts®:

• "Nobody" is the lead single from Avenged Sevenfold's eighth studio album, Life Is but a Dream.... It's the band's first new song since the release of "Mad Hatter" in 2018.
• Avenged Sevenfold wrote and recorded Life is but a Dream... over the course of four years. It sees the rockers channel the wisdom of French philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960). The album's motif not only revolves around Camus' literary works but also mirrors the lyrical themes explored by the band's frontman, M. Shadows. In fact, the five-piece provides a note on the record's pre-order page on their website, which describes the album as "a journey through an existential crisis; a very personal exploration into the meaning, purpose and value of human existence with the anxiety of death always looming."
  
  Camus was a proponent of absurdism, which holds that life had no discernible meaning, and existentialism, which questions the purpose of human existence. "Nobody" is about as existential as it gets.
  
  "If you were to take like a black hole of the record and all the fringes of it, I think 'Nobody' sits right at the center," Shadows said of the song capturing the essence of the album's existential crisis, during an episode of their Trax podcast. "And I think it sits right at the center because the riff is huge, we are experimenting with tones and the production on it, but it also... Like, listen, nothing on the record sounds like anything else on the record - they all have their things - but 'Nobody,' for me, sounds like this solid... It's very depthy in the lyrics, it represents fully where we are coming from in terms of the concept and the headspace we are coming from."
• In "Nobody," Shadows realizes he isn't merely a product of human existence, but rather, he is everything. The lyrics suggest that everything a person experiences is only seen from their own point of view and that they will never experience life through someone else's eyes. Essentially, they are the universe itself.
  
  I'm a God, I'm awake, I'm the one in everything
  I'm alive, I'm the dead, I'm a man without a head
  
  By saying "I'm a man without a head," Shadows recognizes he isn't limited to his identity but instead is everything in the world. He has accepted the absurdity of life and no longer identifies himself by job, name, looks or character. The realization that the search for meaning in a meaningless world is futile has led him to embrace the identity of Nobody.
• This is "I am all" as "I am none"
  Here we fly so high, no, I, no coming down
  Shedding weight as I'm coming undone
  All that's left converging as one
  I am the sun
  
  Shadows recognizes his own significance and compares himself to the all-powerful "sun," the center of our solar system that allows life to exist. However, he acknowledges that one day he will become insignificant and cease to exist, demonstrating his awareness of his own mortality. This duality of recognizing his own worth and insignificance creates a philosophical paradox like those explored in absurdism and existentialism.
• The five Avenged members wrote "Nobody." Joe Barresi (Tool, Avenged Sevenfold, Nine Inch Nails) produced the song along with the rest of Life Is but a Dream.... He also produced the band's previous record, The Stage.
• The Chris Hopewell-directed stop-motion music video takes the viewer on a journey through the complexities of life and death, love and war. The six-minute story follows the action as they confront an existential crisis.
  
  Chris Hopewell is known primarily for his visual collaborations with Radiohead. He previously worked with Avenged guitarist Zacky Vengeance on the band's "The Stage" video.
• The Cure fans are familiar with Albert Camus because of their 1978 debut single, "Killing An Arab," which alludes to Camus' 1942 novella The Stranger. The band took the title from a passage where the protagonist, Meursault, thinks about the emptiness of life after shooting an Arab on a beach for reasons he can't explain. Because of the title, the song drew controversy for provoking anti-Arab sentiment.
  
  Other uses of Camus' works in popular music include:
  
  2000 - "The Masses Against The Classes" by Manic Street Preachers. At the end of the song, the band's vocalist, James Dean Bradfield, quotes a line from Albert Camus' 1951 book The Rebel: "The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown."
  
  2004 - "This Side Of The Blue" by Joanna Newsom. The song includes the lyric, "See him fashion a cap from a page of Camus." The line describes the act of taking knowledge or information from a text and turning it into something practical or tangible.
  
  2013 - "Strife" by Savages. The murder scene in Camus' The Stranger inspired the song's music video.
• Avenged Sevenfold debuted "Nobody" live on May 12, 2023, at their AREA15 convert in Las Vegas. The concert marked the band's triumphant return after nearly five years. Their previous show was on June 30, 2018, at Lover Kemping in Sopron, Hungary.