![]() It’s the sound of 5FDP at their toughest. It begins with a mournful, minute-long orchestral introduction with echoes of Game Of Thrones, before drumbeats accelerate as a dark, threatening riff struts into focus, and Ivan’s enraged voice erupts with a guttural: ‘Take it, I don’t need it/I don’t want to hear your motherfucking side!’ You can’t really predict but we are not stopping any time soon.”Īt this point, the first public glimpse of Death Punch’s next chapter is only weeks away with the planned release of Inside Out, the first single and the album’s opening track. Every tour is bigger than the previous one. “If we don’t fuck this up, and we don’t drive it into the wall, this is still growing. “There’s never going to be another Ozzy, another Slayer and another Metallica, but there is Slipknot, there is Five Finger Death Punch, there are others,” says Zoltan. ![]() And, as metal’s first two or three generations begin heading into retirement or worse, Zoltan still sees the future as open-ended. The weight on 5FDP as modern, frontline warriors of metal with a global popularity has only increased their streaming numbers regularly match Iron Maiden’s. There was also the exit of drummer Jeremy Spencer, who left when an injury made drumming at full bore difficult, and who became a cop and then, more confoundingly, a porn filmmaker. He wasn’t the only member of 5FDP with a substance issue to resolve, but as the hardheaded singer in the spotlight, he inevitably got the most public attention. Ivan was on a wild ride onstage and off, quitting repeatedly, getting sicker, flesh turning yellow as he soaked in alcohol. “If there weren’t bumps in the road, it would have been a shit record,” he then adds, “because that’s complacency and that’s settling.”Īddiction issues aside, recent years have been a season of uncertainty and change for the band. Somebody wants to fire another guy, somebody’s unhappy with someone’s lifestyle. “There was always somebody fucking quitting. “This album has not been fucking easy to make,” Ivan counters. Ivan recently posted a video online of himself smashing through a wall at his house to demonstrate his energy on the new album – on the face of it, an encouraging sign of creative life. “His range is different now than when he’s drinking, and stronger in many ways,” Churko says of Ivan’s vocals. These were signs of Ivan taking back control of his body and personality, after years of boozing and deterioration. The vivid tattoos on his head are markers for a new stage in Ivan’s reconstructed life – there’s a mohawk tattoo made to look like reptilian scales and feathers on his scalp, and a phoenix in flight marks his first year sober. ![]() ![]() Ivan is here with his musical life-partner, guitarist Zoltan Bathory, and longtime producer Kevin Churko, listening to several of the 14 songs recorded for their new record. It’s painful as a motherfucker to hear some of it because it’s still so fresh.” “To hear this takes me to places that I’ll never be able to escape,” Ivan says between tracks that chart his most recent nightmares and unexpected survival. ![]()
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