FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH Hoping To Enter Studio In 'December Or January'

Guitarist Zoltan Bathory of Las Vegas metallers FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH has confirmed to Billboard.com that the band already has "five, six ideas or roughs in the can" for the band's next album, tentatively due in early 2015. "I would say next spring we would want to put something out," he added, "so that means this year we'll be recording here and there and probably go into the studio in December or January. But we definitely want to have something out before next summer for sure.

"In this environment I don't think that bands can allow themselves to stay in a studio for two, three, four years and wait and try to write some masterpiece. In four years, people are going to forget about you. You have go put out records. Thank God we have plenty to say and plenty of material. We don't struggle for material — obviously."

According to Bathory, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH is once again putting ideas together with portable studio equipment on the road — the same way that it did for last year's "The Wrong Side of Heaven..." albums. "That worked out for us really, really well — we got two albums out of it, right?" the guitarist said. "It was great, because it wasn't like the usual, 'Here you go, guys. You have four months, or five, to write a record.' Instead of that we started writing songs and lived with them for possibly a year. And when you get to live with a song it always evolves and evolves and gets better, so I think we'll always do it this way from now on. It's a healthy process."

Bathory also revealed that stretching out the songwriting process over a longer period of time makes it easier for FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH singer Ivan Moody, who, in Zoltan's estimation, has the hardest job in the band, because we write without him. We just give him the full songs, like 'Here you go. here's a song,' and then another one and another one, and he has to come up with the lyrics and the melody. So for him it's fairly difficult, and when we give him songs way ahead of time he has time to live with them. He has more time to breathe and create when he doesn't have to write anything in a period of just a month or something like that."

"The Wrong Side Of Heaven And The Righteous Side Of Hell Volume 2" sold 77,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 2 on The Billboard 200 chart.

The first half of "The Wrong Side Of Heaven And The Righteous Side Of Hell" debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, selling 113,000 copies in its first week of release.