5FDP’s Zoltan Bathory gives the lowdown on all things ‘AfterLife’ Deluxe and THAT collaboration with DMX for ‘This Is The Way’.
Five Finger Death Punch’s Zoltan Bathory recently caught up with Pablo from 93.X to talk all things ‘AfterLife’ digital deluxe edition including how the bands new track, ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’ came about. Also covered, Zoltan talks about what fans can expect from the bands upcoming UK/European and US tours as well as the bands upcoming M73 World Tour shows with Metallica.
On the deluxe edition of ‘AfterLife’:
So basically, the previous record too, these last two [albums] were my favourites. I mean like it’s hard to pick favourites but it was really fun to make – especially this last one [‘AfterLife’] was really fun to make.
I felt like it didn’t come out in the best possible time. There’s a lot of chaos in the world right, and when you drop it, it’s the same thing with movies, you know if you drop a movie and something else happened in the news, then your movie is being ignored, so that’s why people are actually switching to TV shows because then you have many, many chances, instead of one and so that’s kind of a thing.
I think the recording industry is also going to go there. That people stop putting out albums and start putting out songs or batches of songs. I’ve been talking about this for years because there’s so much noise in the world and there’s so much media coming at you that to be heard is difficult.
This record, the latest one [AfterLife], was so fun to make and it kind of came out in the middle of the chaos and I felt like didn’t really get its fair share of attention.
And, then there were other versions of some songs that we were thinking about putting out anyway and then we have a big one, there’s a big one [referring to ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’] that we had it, so the song was recorded, we could have put it on the last album, we could have had this song already, but there was so much work, so much red tape, so many legalities involved to do this song that it just took us forever. So it didn’t make the record. By the time legally everybody cleared, and everyone signed off for it like ‘Okay, you guys can put this out.’, almost a year had passed.
So people were like okay lets re-release the record, lets make a deluxe version where we can put this song, that originally belonged to this record and then all those other stuff, like we had a couple of acoustic versions of songs, and I thought okay let’s package this and release it how it was meant to be with that song.
On how ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’ came about:
The connection is interesting because when somebody looks at it from the outside you wouldn’t know what the real connection is and how this whole thing happened.
We wanted to work with DMX for a long time, this conversation had being going on for years and years and years. If you remember we made ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’, Tech N9ne was on that song, so the connection with us and other genres had already been there. We did some collaborations with country artists [Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Brantley Gilbert], I always looked at music, my taste and Ivan’s taste is really eclectic. We listen to a lot of things that you would not think that we are listening to. Hip-Hop was for me, one of my favourite records came out in ’92, ‘The Chronic’ by Dr. Dre. Remember this band called Grave Diggers from New York? The record came out somewhere in the mid-90s and then RZA came out of that, so I was listening to that stuff and DMX was one of my favourite artists.
To me DMX is sort of a heavy metal guy within the hip-hop community, like he has the voice, the dog bark, the whole thing, and you know there are a lot of other guys, like I love Busta Rhymes and there’s so many others, but I’m in this lane, we’re a heavy metal band but I still listen to that stuff.
Anyway, the DMX conversation was going on for years, but he was not available for various reasons, so we couldn’t work with him and then this conversation was just lingering on but its been around for about five years.
We actually started a convo, not with him personally, but with some of his people, and then unfortunately DMX passed and it came to the point, well is there still a way to do something? And there was a track that we could. I mean there was a lot of legalities, a lot of producers involved, so we talked to everyone, we talked to the estate, we talked to everybody, some of the producers obviously, Universal Records, and various publishers. It was an uphill battle but we really wanted it and then we figured out a way to do it so this happened.
The conversation started about five, maybe six years ago, and the song itself, once we recorded it, it still took about a year to clear it with everyone. Hip Hop works a little bit differently, because generally rock bands write their own stuff and that’s it, but when you have various producers, sometimes multiple producers involved, that means multiple publishers are involved and it’s not that simple to clear something. With collaborations that’s always a thing, that there are so many people involved and the legalities of that, but this is the other side of the music industry that fans probably don’t want to hear about, but this is how it works.
On how 5FDP’s and DMX’s parts came together to form ‘This Is The Way’ in the studio:
You have to respect what it is. We wanted to make sure it was respectful to him [DMX], respectful to his life and his legacy.
It’s not like some back-up tracks, no, no, this is a real feature, this is a real mixture of Death Punch and DMX, so when DMX is on it is DMX, there’s no mistake. Because his voice and delivery, it’s natural, that’s what I meant, like he was kind of like to me the metal head of hip-hop because he always sound like that, so from that perspective it fairly easy because his voice and his delivery kind of gives itself to that style, but when the song switches to his parts, obviously we kind of tone it down, so we give the space for his voice to perform and his voice to be the prominent part of the song obviously.
On how Five Finger Death Punch selected which acoustic songs to include on ‘AfterLife’ deluxe:
So some of those songs, when you write songs, some of them actually start acoustic, like I’m messing around with a guitar or me and Andy [James – 5FDP guitarist] were jamming around on some things and then we build it into that Death Punch sound. And so we build the song up and then we record it how it would be a rock/heavy metal/rock album kind, but then we remembered like man it sounded pretty good when we were just sort of working it out on an acoustic guitar, lets go back and do that too.
So many, many times it happens because it’s just easy to pick up an acoustic guitar, when you have an idea and an acoustic guitar is right there, you just pick it up and lets go versus, okay I need to turn on the amps, get your sounds and you know what I mean, it’s just kind of quicker, easier, so that’s why a lot of these songs actually started with just acoustic guitars. And then obviously we remembered that man that sounded pretty good with the acoustic guitars, so let’s grab that too.
‘Afterlife Deluxe’ is special deluxe edition of 2022’s ‘AfterLife’ album released on Friday 5 April 2024. Alongside the original 12 songs from the album, and new single, ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’, the deluxe edition also features acoustic versions of three of the original albums best loved tracks – ‘Thanks For Asking’, ‘The End’ and ‘Judgement Day’.
5FDP fans can listen to ‘AfterLife: Deluxe’ now on the music streaming service of their choice via https://5fdp.ffm.to/afterlifedeluxe.