FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH bassist Chris Kael has answered ALL THAT REMAINS frontman Phil Labonte's much-discussed claim that "therapy is for women" and that "men don't solve their problems by talking" — by pointing out that he goes to therapy himself.
Speaking on the latest episode of "Beardo & Weirdo", the podcast he co-hosts with comedian Craig Gass, Kael noted that he is single for the first time in a long while before delivering the line: "Against Phil Labonte from ALL THAT REMAINS's advice, I actually go to therapy."
Gass called Labonte's comment "one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard in my life". Kael was more measured, and turned the argument back on itself. "I understand what he's saying, though. There's some truth in there. He basically said that men don't need therapy. We need to take action. We get our good feelings in life from doing. Which is true, but he's telling this in an interview. The interview — you're talking about feelings and whatnot. You're doing therapy in that interview. You're not going to a therapist."
He then laid out what the practice actually does for him. "It has definitely helped me out, with therapy, going in. It's almost like a meditative thing for me. I'm taking a pause from everything else going on in the world. I'm focusing on me, making plans for the future, talking about things that upset me. And not for nothing, I'm clearly still very angry. So, channel that stuff into music. And even it gives me song ideas a couple times, really opening up and being vulnerable about stuff, and, like, 'Oh, there's a song idea.'"
Kael also returned to a conviction he has voiced before: that heavy music is a release valve rather than an accelerant. "It's a simmering rage in there all the time. I don't know where it comes from. But we were talking to Frank Bello [of ANTHRAX on this podcast] just the other day, and he was talking about this music being an outlet for that sort of stuff. God bless music for you all for keeping me sane."
Labonte made the original remarks in June 2026 on Bill Bailey's Today's Boondoggle Podcast, discussing his 2024 op-ed "The Silent Crisis: Why Society Is Failing Men And Boys". In it the singer argued that men have spent three decades being cast as the problem, and pointed to falling male college enrolment, rising male suicide and young men disengaging from work, dating and community life. His position — that men need action rather than conversation — drew immediate pushback across the metal world, and Kael's is among the more considered replies it has received.
Source: blabbermouth.net