Zoltan Bathory stopped by #AudacyCheckIn to talk all things deluxe edition of ‘AfterLife’, DMX, touring with Metallica, Aftershock Festival and more.
On the bands new single ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’:
So I always thought that he’s [DMX] is kind of the metal head of Hip Hop, you know his delivery , the dog bark, the whole attitude. So this conversation of trying to do something together has been going on for years and years – maybe five, six years. For various reasons he was not available for periods of times so we couldn’t really work with him and then when he was available, that’s in the last couple of years, unfortunately he passed. It never really came to fruition.
Since the conversation continued we had access to some of these [DMX] masters that he recorded so we continued the conversation, like ‘respectfully, in what way, how could we still do something.’ and that’s why there was a lot of red tape, obviously people around him and know the family, the estate, the producers, everyone around him, is super protective about his legacy, his art, everything to do with him, so we had to be super respectful.
We worked our way through the channels until we got the green light to use some of these songs and lyrics and then we arranged the song… it’s a true collaboration. We have our part, and then where there’s a part that both DMX and Ivan [Moody] sings the same thing, and there’s a part that the verses are all DMX — and we kind of tone down the guitars there so you can really hear what he’s saying. His cadence, his flow is DMX, you can’t mistake it… if you know DMX, there’s no mistake.”
On whether the band wrote their way around DMX’s rap for ‘This Is The Way’:
That’s exactly what we did so we had the rap masters of the rap and we wrote everything around it and had to figure that out and once it came together, then came the whole process of everybody involved – everyone involved wanted to hear it. Once everybody heard it, everyone was like okay.
Once the song was done we were going to put it on the album [AfterLife – released back in 2022], but because of the process, because of so many people involved and so many publishing companies involved, it took a long time, so we released the album without the track.
The feedback was incredible. Everybody thought this is super respectful to him, the arrangement and the song, everybody loves it. Everybody thought, ‘Man, this is a hit and this might be the last thing we hear from DMX. And if it’s the last thing we hear from DMX, then it’s a proper track.”
“That’s how Hype Williams got involved too… as this was making its way within the community, we thought, ‘OK, how are we gonna do a video for this song?’ Hype did the movie ‘Belly’, and he worked on [DMX’s] music videos. He was very, very close with DMX.” After sending Williams the track, he immediately responded saying he wanted to be a part of the project. Then he told me his whole story… how close he was and he was like, ‘You don’t even know what you guys are sitting on, this is huge.’”
On touring with Metallica on the M72 World Tour:
“That’s great. Eighty, ninety thousand people in a stadium, that’s massive and it’s one of those things where, obviously, we have a big fanbase that overlaps. So, Metallica is such a huge band; they had four decades to gain that fanbase, so you’re gonna have three generations of people in there. And it’s such a big band now that — and in some ways they’re growing, believe it or not, Metallica, still; it’s crazy. And so it’s such a big band that even if you’re not necessarily into metal, you’ve gotta come; you have to come and see.”
“And so that means there are gonna be a lot of people in that arena that, hearing a band named Five Finger Death Punch, they’re probably not gonna give us a chance because they have no idea what that would be. So that means that we are playing to a substantial amount of people who never heard of [us] before. And I can tell that we’re turning them, I can tell, especially after the show. You can definitely see it, because we have, obviously, statistics and online we can measure that. After every show, there’s a jump in visitors and a jump in downloads and a jump in statistics, so I know that we’re hitting a massive amount of people with that.”
On whether he gets recognised more for the band or for Call Of Duty:
So sometimes when people come and say ‘Can I take a picture’, I have to ask!
There was a funny comment, we were on social media, we played one of the Metallica shows, and after that there were pictures and somebody commented and said ‘Man, have I just seen Metallica and the Call of Duty Guy was on stage!’. That was funny!
The deluxe version of ‘AfterLife’ was released on Friday 5 April 2024. Five Finger Death Punch fans can head to the following location to listen to the deluxe version of ‘AfterLife’ on the music streaming service of their choice.
Fans can watch highlights of the full interview with Zoltan Bathory and Audacy on YouTube (linked below) or listen to the FULL 30 minute interview here.