Five Finger Death Punch is currently touring the U.S. with Megadeth, and the band just released a new album, “Afterlife.” In a new interview with FaceCulture, guitarist Zoltan Bathory addressed the hate that comes with heavy metal bands becoming popular and successful outside of the metal world.
“It just what it is,” he said. “In the very beginning, [getting called a sellout] gets under your skin a little bit because you don’t understand… I worked my *ss off to be here. You have no idea how much work this [career has been to get to this point]. It didn’t just pop out of nowhere. This is 30 years in the making. I was 12 years old making my first guitar out of a coffee table because I couldn’t afford one. It’s a lot of work and you just do what you love doing.”
Bathory added that Moody made the point that metal is the only genre where bands that hit the top spot on the charts are accused of selling out. “Ivan pointed this out the other day. He goes, ‘Did you notice this that any other genre if somebody gets a number one hit, they’re celebrated. In heavy metal, you’re a sellout.’ How? Maybe they don’t understand what sellout means. Because I do exactly what I wanna do. I don’t sit in a job I hate. I do exactly what I wanna do. Nobody is pressuring me to do something I don’t want to. I play exactly the music I like. So that’s actually exactly the opposite of selling out.”
Bathory criticized metal fans who think they “own” the genre. “So that’s one thing — people just view this as if this genre should be underground and somebody owns it. And, ‘No. This can’t be popular.’ So it’s a combination of that. A lot of misunderstanding, I guess. We came up pretty quick. I’m sure that has something to do with it. Sometimes I read, ‘Oh, a major label brought a bucket of money and…’ Clearly [those people] have no idea. You don’t know anything about the music industry if you think that’s how that works.”
“There’s no amount of money I can give you and you’re gonna like a band. You just like it or you don’t like it. That’s it. And how people invest in bands also doesn’t work that way. You have to achieve some kind of success, and then you get signed because the label would see that you’re achieving some success. They aren’t investing in something that they don’t know if people are gonna like it or not; that’s not how this works. And then plus, our story, the first record, it was completely homemade, produced by us. We made it my living room — literally. So we were exactly the opposite of that — we achieved and earned everything.”
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