During a recent interview with Audacy Check In, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH guitarist Zoltan Bathory discussed the experience of him and his bandmates supporting METALLICA on a massive stadium tour throughout 2023 and 2024.
“That’s great. Eighty, ninety thousand people in a stadium, that’s massive,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “And it’s one of those things where, obviously, we have a big fanbase that overlaps. So, METALLICA is such a huge band; they had four decades to gain that fanbase, so you’re gonna have three generations of people in there. And it’s such a big band now that — and in some ways they’re growing, believe it or not, METALLICA, still; it’s crazy. And so it’s such a big band that even if you’re not necessarily into metal, you’ve gotta come; you have to come and see.
“And so that means there are gonna be a lot of people in that arena that, hearing a band named FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH, they’re probably not gonna give us a chance because they have no idea what that would be. So that means that we are playing to a substantial amount of people who never heard of [us] before. And I can tell that we’re turning them, I can tell, especially after the show. You can definitely see it, because we have, obviously, statistics and online we can measure that. After every show, there’s a jump in visitors and a jump in downloads and a jump in statistics, so I know that we’re hitting a massive amount of people with that.”
Originally, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH was slated to accompany METALLICA for various European shows in the spring of 2023. However, they ultimately called off these dates to facilitate singer Ivan Moody‘s complete recuperation from his recent hernia surgery.
