Ivan Moody Chronicling Path to Sobriety on New Five Finger Death Punch Album
It's been a long way back from hell for Five Finger Death Punch vocalist Ivan Moody. The band's upcoming album will chart that journey — Moody's road from self-destruction to sobriety — via the lyrics on the Las Vegas rockers' forthcoming effort, as guitarist Zoltan Bathory revealed this week.
By now, diehards probably know Moody got on the wagon after years of alcohol abuse. The singer's even credited fellow frontmen such as Rob Halford and Jonathan Davis with guiding his hand from alcohol. But it was a different tale two years ago when the spiraling habit threatened Moody's position in the band. Now, after celebrating their singer's first year of sobriety, Five Finger Death Punch's imminent release — plotted for sometime next year — will provide some insight into that excursion. Chiefly by way of its words, since Moody is the band's primary lyricist.
"He came through hell," Bathory told North Carolina's News & Record Thursday (Nov. 7). "He came back. And that journey, that message is there in the lyrics. A lot of it is about that, his experiences of what happened to him when he was down, how people treated him. He came back, and how people doubted him, that he could come back. And when he comes back, the world is different and he has a different attitude. He can process what happened as a person. So all of those phases, lyrically, are definitely on the record."
Delving further, the FFDP guitarist also detailed just what went down back in 2017 when the band gave Moody somewhat of an ultimatum. Following a time when the vocalist's addiction reached its nadir, the group's members told Moody he had to clean himself up or he'd be out of a job.
"We had to … threaten him that we're going to take away the last thing that he loves, the band," Bathory remembered of the intervention. "And it's a bluff. We didn't want to do that, but we had to say that. We had to say, 'Listen, if you don't [do] this now, you're done. You're out.'"
Thankfully, the situation didn't quite come to that after Moody experienced success in his soberness. Consequently, it looks like the band have never been more productive. They just launched a full U.S. tour after their hometown declared Nov. 1 "Five Finger Death Punch Day."
That said, don't expect to hear songs from the group's upcoming album during their current shows. "Yesterday we were talking about how we just play our hits," Bathory said when revealing the set list contains only past material. "It was just funny because it was a conversation and not a plan."
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