Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Zoltan Bathory opened up about the band’s turbulent history with frontman Ivan Moody, revealing details in a recent interview.
Bathory was asked whether the band’s rocky moments ever led him to consider disbanding Five Finger Death Punch or parting ways with Moody. The singer has stormed offstage on more than one occasion. Bathory explained why he never seriously entertained that idea, despite the singer’s unpredictable nature.
“Never,” Bathory said. “Because I always respected that Ivan is the middle finger of this generation – a hand grenade with a loose spring. That’s who he is.”
He went on to describe what makes Moody, in his view, impossible to replace despite the challenges of working with him.
“I always looked at that as amazing: he’s uncorruptible,” Bathory continued. “I could tell him, ‘Ivan, you’ll lose a million dollars if you don’t feel like doing these shows’, and he’d say, ‘F*ck off, I don’t care. I don’t give a shit.’ So he’s hard to manage, but I could, because I respected that he’s as punk rock as punk rock can get.”
Bathory then turned to a more candid, and at times humorous, admission about how he copes with the tension between the two.
“Sometimes I want to kill him,” he said. “Sometimes I’m making plans, thinking about what supplies I need, where I hide the body. But then I’m like, ‘Man, then I don’t have a singer who can do all these things.’ So you stay with the fantasy.”
He closed the thought by suggesting the feeling may well be mutual, framing it as part of the band’s long-standing dynamic.
“And I’m pretty sure he’s plotting, too – ‘If I could just tie some dynamite to his backpack…'” Bathory said. “We’re brothers, but we understand who we are and how to work together, and what’s worth fighting about and what isn’t.”
The volatility Bathory describes did not appear out of nowhere. It traces back to a much darker period in the band’s history, one that nearly ended both the group and its frontman’s life.
Moody spent years battling alcohol addiction. By his own admission, he performed drunk on stage on multiple occasions during that stretch. The chaos extended off stage as well. A widely publicized incident saw him arrested during a tour stop, an episode that became emblematic of just how close to the edge the singer was living.
The turning point came in 2017, when the band was on tour with Linkin Park. Bathory has recounted how Chester Bennington personally intervened, pulling Moody aside and telling him bluntly that he needed to go to rehab immediately. That tough-love moment, delivered by Bennington just months before his own death, is credited with pushing Moody toward the sobriety he has maintained since.
Bathory has said that shift changed everything for the band. With Moody sober, Five Finger Death Punch was able to stabilize creatively and personally. This laid the groundwork for the kind of hard-won brotherhood Bathory now describes, one built on mutual respect rather than constant crisis management.
That history adds weight to Bathory’s darkly comic reflections on wanting to kill his singer. The two men have been through addiction, intervention, and recovery together. The loyalty Bathory expresses is rooted in having watched Moody fight his way back from a genuinely life-threatening place, not just in tolerating his onstage unpredictability.
The band’s endurance through all of it is now being marked in a very public way. Five Finger Death Punch is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, with Moody and Bathory still standing as the group’s creative core after two decades together.
