FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH Guitarist Talks About Next Album In New Interview

Dan Marsicano of About.com recently conducted an interview with guitarist Zoltan Bathory of Los Angeles metallers FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

About.com: You just alluded to the band working on the third album. Can you give a status update on the album?

Zoltan Bathory: We just came off the road. We finished the last tour of this record. We did seven major tours on that part of the record, so we were anxious to come home and sleep in our own beds for a while. I just got together with the guys yesterday. We had about ten days off; almost two weeks to recuperate. We just got together yesterday making plans, logistics, how we're going to write this record. There are ideas already that we have to work out of, so there are a couple of things already written. We're starting up within a week and hope to release it somewhere around April/May. It's a little bit of an ambitious plan, but we're going to try to do.

About.com: Do you guys only plan to stay in the studio for a little bit? Do you want this to go out real quickly and not spend six months in the studio like some bands do?

Zoltan Bathory: Basically, that's the idea. I think it's a mistake when bands stay in studios for long periods of time. The world is really fast these days and there's no reason for a band to not be able to release albums faster. For a fairly acceptable price, you can build your own studio that's good enough to record. There's no excuse anymore that you have to stay in a professional studio forever. You do need them, so I'm not saying that you don't. For the pre-production, everything we write, we already write it in a studio. We all have our own studios at home. So technically, when you write, you're kind of tracking some songs already. By the time we go to the actual studio with the engineers and the producers to record the album, by then, we have the framework of the songs. Basically, all the pre-production happens at home. So this way it's just a little bit faster. Instead of writing, writing, writing, and then go to the studio and start from scratch, you already go to the studio with some stuff already recorded or some structures already built.

About.com: What are you striving to achieve with the third album?

Zoltan Bathory: Looking at that, it's more of an internal thing. With other band members spending more and more time together, you almost know what the other guy is going to do. It's more of an internal thing where the band gets more like an oiled machine, works easier together and everything snaps into place. The second record was a record that was made by the band. The first record, somebody had to start a band, so I wrote many of the songs. The second album is more of a teamwork effort and I look for the third album for everyone to be more involved. As for the music, from the outside, I don't think anything is going to drastically change. The thing is, we found our sound, so to speak. It's still going to evolve, but not drastically. If you put in FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's first, second, or third record, you'll still recognize that it is FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH. You kind of stick to the sound that you have. Like any band that I was into, from PANTERA to METALLICA to IRON MAIDEN, you hear the first couple of riffs and you know it's them. I think that identity is very important and it's crazy to lose. I think we already have that sonic identity and we keep doing what we're doing. It's all about writing good songs. The possibilities are infinite when you're looking at it that way. So we already have the sound, it's going to sound like a DEATH PUNCH record, and we're just going to handle it the same way as we always do. It's all about the songs at the end of the day; the songs have to be good.

Read the entire interview from About.com.