Zoltan Bathory discusses Five Finger Death Punch’s new song featuring the late DMX and also admits the band may be releasing more unexpected collaborations soon.
Covered in the Loudwire Nights podcast are:
- What the next item on his bucket list is: “I definitely want to get my astronaut wings.
- Why the band was so nervous to play on Metallica’s donut-shaped stage for the M72 tour.
- How Five Finger Death Punch ended up working with Hype Williams on the music video for ‘This Is the Way’.
Check out some extracts from the interview below [transcribed by FFDP UK] and keep scrolling to listen to the full episode on the Loudwire Nights Podcast Player.
On life since becoming a character in Call of Duty:
It’s interesting when people come up to me to take a picture and I have to kind of figure it out band, call of duty or, jiu jitsu. It does happen. There was a funny event. We had just played at show with Metallica and after it there was this big chat, this conversation online and I read one of these comments and the guy goes ‘Hey man, I just went to see Metallica and the Call Of Duty guy was on stage!’. So it happens! It’s kind of funny!
Hey man, that’s the whole idea you just shoot in all directions man. I love the fact that I can live a life [where I] have multiple avenues, multiple things I’m passionate about doing. [But] the music is always my main thing, everything else adds to it.
On whether it feels like a sense of closure now that ‘AfterLife: Deluxe’ is out:
So number one is that obviously the big news is the collaboration with DMX. That’s the big news on the album. The reason that this deluxe edition even exists is because we recorded that song [‘This Is The Way’] and it was supposed to be on this album [the original release of ‘AfterLife’ in 2022], but especially since DMX passed there were so many people, producers, publishers, so many people were involved, everybody has to give it the green light and as we were going through that process we realise that this might take a long time to do this and we [couldn’t] just sit on the record. We recorded the album and probably sat on it for five months whilst we were doing this process [and ended up releasing it without it.]
It [‘Afterlife’] never felt whole because that song [was missing]… when you make an album, at least how we do it, when we record an album there’s an understanding of flow. There is a moment where okay, I’m looking at the album what we have so far and then I’m like okay, you know what it needs a couple of fast songs. It’s too mid tempo, or it’s too slow, so we’re going to have to throw in a couple of mid-tempo songs here maybe some higher tempo songs here to pick up the pace or, it’s all angry and we need to do a couple of smoother songs, so there’s a flow. Every song on the record has a reason to be there. Not just from the perspective of this song means something but from the perspective of the album. Same with a live set. There’s a reason why what’s, where. You can’t start a live set with a ballad. So there’s certain spots of what you put where.
And so this record never felt quite complete because one of the songs that was important, one of the most important songs actually, on the record, had a spot and it wasn’t there. So it always felt a little bit like, man we’re missing something here, we’re missing that song. So yes from that perspective it is definitely a closure because we completed the record how it was meant to be.
On future collaborations with other artists:
To tell you the truth, don’t be surprised if in the near future you start to see collaborations with the weirdest artists that we [Five Finger Death Punch] can possibly collaborate with because I’m interested in doing that and so is Ivan [Moody].
We’re like, you know what would be cool… this is how it comes up! we’re sitting around, Ivan goes man I really like this song ‘Blue On Black’. I wasn’t really familiar with the song so I’m like “Okay, play it to me then, okay this is cool!” and [he goes] “Yeah it’s Kenny Wayne Shepherd, I really like this song! Let’s redo this song.” and I’m like ‘Okay’.
So we do the song and he [Ivan Moody] goes, “You know what would be cool? We should send it to Kenny [Wayne Shepherd]. Like what do you think of it.”
So imagine when Kenny Wayne Shepherd, the guy that wrote this song goes ‘Man, I want to be part of this!”. And he ended up singing and playing guitar on his own song that we redid.
And then Brantley Gilbert [who] is a country artist [goes] ‘This is cool!”, because they were working in the same studio, “I want to do this.” so he jumps in. And then Brian May, Brian ‘Freaking’ May, legend, he [heard] about this, he’s working in the studio and he’s like “Oh I want to play on that!” Now that, that is magic. You have Brantley Gilbert, Kenny Wayne Shepherd on a Kenny Wayne Shepherd song, Brian May and Five Finger Death Punch doing this song. That is magic.
We’re talking about some crazy stuff. Like man, it always starts when we’re sitting around and somebody goes ‘You know what would be cool… we’re living in the same time as… and then it happens. (Laughs)
On how touring with Metallica came about:
That was a very interesting process. We never crossed paths with Metallica before we played with them in Germany. We were backstage talking to Lars [Ulrich] and Lars was saying like yeah that’s so weird because we’re around, next year is going to be twenty years, nineteen years, Death Punch started in 2005, first record [The Way of the Fist] 2007, so in twenty years and those guys are out for forty.
So we had this conversation backstage and Lars was like Man, if you look at the Billboard Charts or the end of year charts, we’re [Metallica and Five Finger Death Punch] always neck and neck, on all the same charts, and we said we’d never crossed paths. How weird. And he was kind of joking like lets do something, lets not wait another forty years to do something. It was kind of somewhat unexpected a couple of months later we got a phone call like hey this is a reality lets do this.