FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH release their tenth studio album, "Legacy", digitally on July 31, and guitarist Zoltan Bathory would like to clear something up: the title is not a goodbye.
"I got this question. People told me before, like, 'Legacy, it sounds like you guys are retiring.' I go, 'No, not even close,'" Bathory told Alena Hamberger of Germany's Rock Antenne. "But it's more like a marker, like, 'Wow, we got this far.'"
The numbers behind that marker are hard to argue with. "Tenth album, which not many bands get that far, that they get to make ten albums and successfully. Ten albums, twenty years — it just happens so that all these numbers coincided," the guitarist said.
For Bathory, the word carries a specific weight. "It was us kind of talking about how when you were a kid, did you think, growing up, you're gonna be a musician — because we all wanted to be, obviously. But when you were dreaming of the band in the future you're gonna be, did you dream of that, that you're gonna create a band that will actually have a legacy? A legacy, that means 20, 30, 40, 100 years from now, if they write a book about this era of where we lived in and heavy metal and hard rock, we will not be forgotten. We will be in the book. We have a legacy. We're not gonna be left out. It mattered enough. It mattered to millions of people."
He was equally insistent that the legacy isn't the band's alone. "We have a different fanbase than most bands. This fanbase is a tribe. It's a family. Some of them are with us literally from the first album," he said. "Sometimes I run into people who say, like, 'Hey, I was on stage with you guys when I was 10 years old.' And I'm like, 'What? You look like you're 30 and you have two kids.' And he's like, 'My son is a big fan now.' So it's generational as well."
Bathory pointed to the band's global fan club network as proof. "Not a single fan club we ever started. It was always started by the fans for themselves… The U.K. club, the German and the Norwegian club are all there with their local flags that they convert their country's flag into a DEATH PUNCH flag. I mean, it's insane."
"Legacy" arrives digitally on July 31, with CD, vinyl and cassette editions following on September 18. The band debuted the title track live for the first time on July 20 in Camden, New Jersey, at the opening night of their 20th-anniversary world tour, alongside previously released singles "Eye Of The Storm" and "De Oppresso Liber".
The 48-city North American leg, with Cody Jinks and EVA UNDER FIRE, wraps October 23 at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia, before the band moves on to European arenas with LAMB OF GOD and BLEED FROM WITHIN in early 2027.