Zoltan Bathory Talks Five Finger Death Punch’s 9th Studio Album, ‘Afterlife’

Five Finger Death Punch is no doubt one of the most sensational rock acts of the last 15 years. While they’ve experienced their fair share of polarization within the scene, as any successful rock outfit has, their gargantuan fanbase and countless accolades in the modern rock space are further proof that they are a force to be reckoned with in 2022. Over the course of eight studio albums the band has sold more than 5 million records and 11.2 million digital songs in the U.S. alone, granting them six gold albums and four platinum records to date. In terms of sheer consumption, Five Finger Death Punch are the 3rd biggest hard rock band with over 8.6 billion streams, putting them right behind legendary bands Metallica and AC/DC.

All things considered, it’s truly astonishing that a modern rock act that’s less than two decades old can go head to head with two of the most revered bands in history, both of whom were established 40+ years ago. It goes to show the genuine fandom that Five Finger Death Punch has amassed over the years, much of which is due to the band’s consistency when it comes to touring and releasing new music. In fact, since 2007 the band has released a new studio album every two years and toured the globe relentlessly. Even with the exception of the 2020 pandemic, which occurred the same week the band released their eighth studio album F8, Five Finger Death Punch stuck to business as usual and used the opportunity to head back to the studio and begin work on their ninth album.

In keeping with that consistency, today marks the release of their latest studio album, Afterlife. Speaking more on the conception of their ninth record and how the current social climate influenced the record, Five Finger Death Punch guitarist/songwriter Zoltan Bathory discusses the matter.

You’re gearing up for an eventful next few months with the band’s upcoming ninth studio album and U.S. Tour. What are the nerves and excitement levels like for you on this particular album cycle?

As you said, this is the ninth album and as the band has developed we’ve pumped out albums every two years because I believe that every album is a snapshot of who you are as a band, a person, and also the environment you’re in. If you take a snapshot every two years people can follow the trajectory, and the second you wait four or five years, a lot changes. So that’s why we bang out albums one after another because we always believe that’s about the right time. When it comes to this ninth album, I guess I would say the pressure goes away because it’s our ninth album, and with nine albums people know who you are.

People who are into this kind music, whether they like us or don’t like us, it doesn’t matter, they know who the band is when they hear it. And so that takes away the pressure, in fact it opens a little bit of a wider door with “well, I don’t have to prove anything now, I don’t have to establish anything because it’s already been established.” So it gives you this longer and wider runway of “well, let’s just do things that might be unexpected. Let’s write everything, there’s no stupid ideas, let’s bring it and see what happens, develop all the songs, and we’ll decide at the end if it goes or if it doesn’t.” It brings a little bit of an artistic freedom because it’s our ninth album, and because we’re established on that level. As an artist it’s really important that it’s honest first and foremost, you write what you like. That pressure of ‘what you’re supposed to be’ sort of disappears the more and more albums you have.

You’ve previously stated that ‘Afterlife’ feels like a concept album in how it came together, though it wasn’t intended to be conceptual. Did having that sense of freedom with this record contribute to a more experimental side in the final product?

Yes, it’s basically how this album happened. I think the setup and all the circumstances with how this album happened created that, because our last record F8, which we were really proud of, it came out literally the week the pandemic started. So we couldn’t really tour on that record even though that record actually did really well. I still consider it a victim of that circumstance. Before we did this new record we were just like everyone else, ‘let’s wait until this is over and we can go back on the road,’ but that time just kept moving from three months to six months to a year. When we realized that, we thought, well, if we wait who knows how long it’s going to take and then we’re missing that cycle that we just talked about — every two years we go and do another record. So it felt like who knows how long it’s going to take, it might be three or four years until we could make another album if we start touring.

So the circumstances were ‘let’s just go back to the studio and let’s just work on some new stuff,’ and with that circumstance there was no pressure, no deadline, and it was still mid-pandemic. And so that sort of laid the foundation for this, and plus we’ve already established our sound so it truly opened this wide lane where we could just go and do whatever and see what comes out. As the songs were developing, it wasn’t meant to be a concept album but I think what linked it together was we always talk about current and relevant things. We’re not singing about historical events like greek mythology and stuff like that, so lyrically this album started to talk about current and relevant things like how there’s a paradigm shift happening in the world.

By Paradigm shift I mean let’s say you look at the 1950’s. In the 50’s Elvis Presley couldn’t really dance on TV because that was like “whoa whoa whoa, that’s too much.” Ten years later, people are eating mushrooms and LSD, and there’s a sexual and musical revolution and this explosion that happens in the human consciousness, it’s a massive paradigm shift. That happened a little bit one more time in the 1980’s which is when heavy metal and hard rock came into focus, and it was more about a rebellion on the structure of society. All of a sudden you could just be a kid playing guitar, and if you’re really good at your craft you could actually jump social classes. So even though maybe your family couldn’t afford for you to go to Harvard or Yale, you could become a rockstar and live a different life.

Right now, I think the world is looking at another paradigm shift, and I think it’s coming from one, the world stopped. This whole thing that happened was the first global event in all of recorded history, because even WWII was sort of localized, it wasn’t really global. This however was. It was a global issue that effected everyone everywhere. So that’s the baseline, everyone was forced to stop and that meant that the hamster wheel stopped. All of a sudden people were home and had some time to reassess and think, and in so many ways people also realized the real basics of “I’m going to work so I can make money to pay for the car that I bought, so that I can go to work.” These sort of basic life decisions started to become very clear to people, and there was this change on that basic level and shift in how people look at life and what’s important to them. How do we live, how do we live in society, what’s the structure, does this make sense, am I doing something that satisfies me, is it life?

So that’s one, the second is that there is a strip of consciousness when it comes to existence in the universe, meaning human existence. 20 years ago if you said “hey I had a close encounter with some extraterrestrials,” people would be like “cool, you’re crazy.” Now you have generals in the U.S. Navy and everyone talking about it, it’s become a subject and it questions the fundamentals of what we think we are and where we are in this universe. All of a sudden this gives the ability for artists to talk about things that we maybe wouldn’t touch on 20 years ago. For example my band, things that we would talk about behind closed doors a couple of years ago that I probably wouldn’t have discussed publicly, like near death experiences, I’ve had a couple of those.

My lead singer [Ivan Moody] had a near death experience, or I guess you could say he basically died. That’s not necessarily something that you’re going to talk about publicly, in fact when it happened to me for the first time when I was 12 years old, for decades I didn’t say anything to anyone. It kind of started my spiritual life. When I was a kid I went to libraries and I tried to figure out what happened and what this experience was. I started to read Life After Death and I would look at quotations in a book and where it came from. I found Yoga and eastern philosophy, and it kind of swung me down that road where in my young years I was seeking out gurus and yogis that were known to do things that are miracles. And so it’s not like all of a sudden I became spiritual, this was always my life but we were just not talking about it. Now that the world is changing and the audience is changing, people are interested in this kind of stuff, so that’s why on this record we started to talk about these things, and that’s why [Afterlife] sort of felt like a concept album. For example, the song “Judgment Day,” which is very different from anything we’ve ever done before, I literally wanted to write a soundtrack to the process of dying.

During the process of dying your mind collapses on itself and you realize that everything that you ever taught yourself and experienced is really the creation of your mind, it was projected inside of your head. It’s like radio waves right now, you’re sitting in radio waves but you don’t hear them because you don’t have the decoder, but it’s all around you. When you’re dying this process becomes very clear and your resolution widens. Imagine waveforms of a higher note you’re not going to hear because even though it’s pulsating you just don’t have the resolution. When you’re in the process of dying all of a sudden you do, so all the sounds and everything becomes fragmented and you can kind of tell that this is a waveform and you start to understand that. So I tried to make that into a musical form with “Judgement Day.” When I gave the music to Ivan, who also had a near death experience, he immediately recognized that. The first thing he said was “oh no, I’m not recording this song, this freaks me out and puts me back exactly to that place.” So he immediately recognized that sound, and it was the last song that we recorded because for a long time he was saying “every time I’m going to listen to this song, it’s going to put me back in that moment when I died, and it’s always going to freak me out.” Eventually we recorded the song but how interesting is it that he recognized the sound immediately?

That’s how we’ve always been writing music, I’m a huge fan of classical songwriters who give you a complex picture and message without vocals. If you’re listening to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” you can tell which one is winter, which one is spring, how do you know? Music gives you a very complex picture and I think that’s a lost art, a lot of musicians kind of forget about that. I’ve always looked at music that way, so when we compose music I approach it from the perspective of I have to paint the picture for you first before we even give it to the vocalist. That was always our approach.

One huge achievement I don’t think FFDP get enough credit for is having cultivated a unique and specific sound within modern rock and heavy metal music, which is no easy task.

It’s very interesting that you tap on that because if you think about it most hard rock and heavy metal bands are instrumental in the same way. You have drums, guitar, or two guitars, bass and a vocal. It’s pretty difficult to squeeze out a sound that could be your own with that basic instrumentation. But if you look at what’s responsible for that, generally it’s the voice of the singer, their voice quality, and their cadence. That’s one of the elements, the other is probably going to be the rhythm guitar because the rhythm guitar is always present. Most of the time when something is unique it happens because it’s honest, it not necessarily happening from will or ‘how do I make this unique.’ If you’re consciously looking for that then it’s a little bit artificial because you’re looking for it. Generally stuff just kind of happens.

If I look at our sound, when it comes to songwriting and structures it was kind of influenced by 80’s metal. We like to have big choruses and guitar solos, but then when nu metal came I wasn’t a fan but I really liked the sound. It was when bands started to tune down and play these baritone guitars, and man it sounded ferocious. What I like is that style of songwriting with big songs, big choruses, arena rock but with the sound of nu metal. I switched to baritone guitars around 1999 to 2000, and that also changes how you play, so it started to develop my rhythm abilities and my understanding of rhythm even more. If someone asked me to really break it down I mean we’re writing in these song structures with a sort of Nu metal sound, with a singer that can both sing and scream and do all the possibilities. And when we came into the world in 2007 with our first record, nobody really sounded like us, of course you’re not going to reinvent the wheel but we did have our own sound.

It’s certainly an achievement what you’ve been able to do since then, but also how you’ve remained so consistent throughout the last 15 years.

Beyond that there is that connection with the fans, that’s something you can’t fake. A lot of these things are coming from the honesty of what you do. For example, interestingly hard rock and heavy metal are the only genres where if you get a No.1 hit, instead of people celebrating they go ‘oh you sold out.’ Why is that? That to me is insane. It’s almost like well this is the music of the rebellion so when you get a No. 1 hit you sell out [laughs]. To me that’s insane.

Absolutely and unfortunately it’s been like that for years. That’s what many said about Metallica back when they dropped the Black Album in ’91.

Right, remember when Metallica did their first music video for “One” and people lost their minds? Like ‘oh they’re selling out!’ Or even when they did the Black Album, one of the greatest records of all time and just how many people lost their minds. And if you understand what rock and heavy metal music is then you would understand that it’s a brotherhood. It’s always been about that, this brotherhood, this tribal experience. So when Metallica hit it big to me that was like “yes!” I was happy, it was one of our guys making it big, I was proud. I don’t understand that mentality, and I don’t think people actually understand what selling out means. I’ve wanted to do this since I was a little kid, I made my first guitar out of a coffee table because I couldn’t buy one and couldn’t afford it. So I literally got a jigsaw and used my parents coffee table, I was 12 years old. This is what I wanted to do, and I grew up in a socialist communist country and I didn’t have a passport, I couldn’t get out of that country, it was a completely ridiculous and impossible dream.

I came to New York City when I was 21 years old with a guitar, a bag of clothes, and I didn’t speak English. It was quite a climb I’ll tell you that, I lived in places you would not believe, but I had a dream since I was 12 and I never sold myself out and never sold out the dream. I never for a second thought that I couldn’t do it, and never for a second did I give up on it, and between 12 years old and when it happened, decades had passed. Never for a second did I sell out on that kid that I promised, “we’re going to do this, I’m going to go to America and I’m going to play rock music and tour the world.” I never sold out on that, and so I do what I love doing. You have to have that honesty, and especially when you play hard rock and heavy metal, it’s a genre that’s not exactly the most popular. So when you’re in this genre you already have to love it because you already picked one of the smallest genres, so you really have to love this kind of music to pick this as your path.