Five Finger Death Punch’s Zoltan Bathory gives the lowdown on all things ‘Best Of – Volume One’ with Audacy.
In a candid new interview with Audacy, guitarist Zoltan Bathory dives deep into the band’s latest project, ‘Best Of – Volume One’, and what it means to re-record their most iconic tracks. From the powerful new version of “I Refuse” featuring Maria Brink to their upcoming anniversary plans, Zoltan shares the band’s motivations, mindset, and what lies ahead – including a brand-new album on the horizon.
On why Five Finger Death Punch made the decision to re-record old songs:
It’s pretty common in the music industry. Outside of the music industry people don’t really know that this actually happens, but record labels do trade or sell masters many times without letting the artist know or having the chance even to participate. From a business perspective, from the record label label side it’s a move on the chessboard, and now this is our move now. [The re-recorded songs] will be the anniversary version. The 2025 anniversary version.
Taylor Swift did what she did. I was a brilliant move and many artists, when it happens to them, they’re kind of helpless and don’t really have an answer and some artists go you know what, you’ve made your move and we’re going to make ours and it is what it is.
Taylor Swift has a hardcore fanbase so when she put out the new songs, the fan base just simply switched to the new streams. It just so happens that we have probably the craziest fanbase on the planet. These guys are with us since day one and they’re hardcore. They’re the most loyal fanbase and probably the same thing is going to happen [as what happened to Taylor Swift – fans will switch to streaming the new versions.]
On what it was like re-recording Five Finger Death Punch’s songs:
These new versions are almost like paying respect to the old ones because those were recorded and they sounded incredible. In fact, that’s kind of a challenge – when you have to re-record your own songs. It’s not a cover. You have to record your own song and you have to do it better than you did before.
We got to live with these songs for years, listening to them. Also, your voice changes a little bit as you’re getting older, right? A lot of factors go into it but you pretty much that – you live with those songs. Now there was no problem with the song(s) to begin with. So that’s what I meant by it’s a challenge, ‘Woah, they were great’, in my opinion. All these songs, we are proud of them. That’s a challenge. How do we re-imagine them for 2025. How do we do this? You’ll hear it [when you listen to the album]. We put the work in.
On whether the plan is for Five Finger Death Punch to re-record all of their songs:
We’re starting with 30. So basically we looked at what are the most popular 30 songs and then we were like, lets get those, because those are the ones that resonate most with the fans the most. Let’s record those and this is the 20th anniversary, so besides what happened with the masters, we were also already looking for something to do for the fans.
So it was kind of like, here’s some lemon, lets make some lemonade. It’s the perfect opportunity, instead of getting mad about it, it is what it is, why don’t we turn it into a positive? We’re going to re-record it, fans are going to be happy. This is the 30 most popular songs, lets re-imagine them, let’s record them with todays sound and today’s voice. We lived with these songs for years and years, so how would they sound today? And we just did that.
On whether 5FDP has plans to put out an original new album soon:
Yeah, definitely. We are doing this first and then the new album.