Born in 1978 in communist Hungary, Five Finger Death Punch architect and guitarist Zoltan Bathory was a furious kid who had no regard for the rules of his country and dreamed about escaping to the West. His discovery of metal only fanned the flames of rebellion, while his judo lessons gave him the mindset that any problem was something to be solved.
“You have to fight a guy twice your size, and at first that’s scary,” Zoltan explains. “But then you go, ‘Well, I think I can take him’, and suddenly the impossible starts to feel like, ‘I think I can do that.’ Every war can be won some way, I’m just going to figure out the way to win it.”
By the late 90s, he’d moved to New York and embarked on a career in design. In 2000, he relocated to LA, and although he played in bands in his spare time, he realised he wanted to be the leader of his own band, and Five Finger Death Punch were born. Their debut album, 2007’s The Way Of The First, catapulted them to the forefront of the scene, landing them tours with the likes of Korn and Disturbed.
Today, Five Finger Death Punch are a multi-platinum act celebrating their 20th anniversary, and are about to release their 10th album, Legacy. Whether driving monster trucks, playing gigs for veterans or creating the band’s visuals, Zoltan remains their fearless and irrepressible leader, his humble beginnings behind the Iron Curtain and struggle to the top never forgotten.
“When I look at my walls filled with platinum records, it’s not about the platinum records,” he says. “It’s about how much work it took to get them.”
You were born in Hungary in the 70s, under communist rule. What was it like growing up in that environment?
“I was a pretty angry kid. And the reason I was angry – even though I was seven or eight years old – is that at that age, it’s not like I could put on my backpack and head to America. You can’t do that. But the fact that I couldn’t, if I wanted to, just enraged me.
“We had access to Western society – we understood the culture, because things kind of seeped through. We had only one TV channel – it started at noon, finished at midnight, and there was no TV on Monday. As a kid I didn’t really feel oppressed, but we were oppressed – we couldn’t do certain things. I always thought, ‘Man, I can’t be a cog in this machine, I’ve got to break out of this.’”
How did you go about planning your escape route?
“I educated myself by going to extra schools. I was doing judo. I became a martial artist pretty quickly; I started at nine, and I competed. I attained that whole mindset that later became the foundation of my life. In extra school, anything I could study, I studied. I had this idea: I have to be faster, stronger, smarter than anyone around me if I want to break out of here.”
How did judo affect your mindset?
“Judo is the art of the samurai, tamed down, but with the same mentality. I know that if I get into a fight, I can do some damage – but that’s not what it’s about. The important part is the person you become. Obstacles are no longer obstacles; they’re challenges. That’s a massive distinction. The world is not happening to me – I am happening to the world. I was born into this world, and I’m going to impact it.”
How did you get introduced to metal?
“OK, so this is England’s fault. I was a little rebel at seven, eight, nine years old. I was already like, ‘When we grow up, we’re going to take down this system.’ My parents were scared shitless – ‘Kid, you’re going to get us arrested.’ And I was always like, ‘No, we’re not going to take this communist bullshit.’ So I started listening to British punk: Manufactured Romance, Cockney Rejects, The Exploited, GBH, UK Subs. That was my world. So imagine, I’m eight years old, a miniature punk in a country where you get your ass beat just for being a punk. I had a British-flag pin – I got my ass kicked by the cops, because that was Western society. It was crazy.
Metal wasn’t just music – it was the voice of rebellion.
Zoltan Bathory
“Eventually, I heard of this band – Iron Maiden. Paul Di’Anno was the singer, and he’s kind of a punk guy. So the cassette was handed to me, like, ‘Check this out, bro, this is a punk band.’ At that age, I didn’t know what a guitar solo was – that was the first one. So I switched from punk to metal.”
What did you like about metal?
“In a way, it wasn’t just music – it was the voice of rebellion. All of us kids had long hair, and we got our asses beat for it. Any motherfucker who says, ‘Oh you guys are fake metal’ – fuck you. I got beat up by the cops for being a metalhead. I bled for this shit. We’d go to the park with these little gangs, cranking music – somebody had a mobile tape recorder, a boombox. When a cop showed up, we’d start running. All the metal shows were in burned-out, shitty places, usually broken up by the cops.”
We want to hear about some of those DIY shows, because they sound wild!
“Literally nobody had equipment. It was like, ‘Oh, this guy has a drum set, that’s pretty decent’, and then every band would play on that drum set. ‘Oh, this guy has an amplifier, that’s decent.’ Everybody would use that amplifier. If you don’t have resources, you have to be resourceful.
“I actually went to a special high school – the first in my country with a computer faculty. So, I wasn’t just getting a high school diploma, I was also getting a microelectronic engineering degree at the same time. So I could design and build amplifiers, distortion pedals, all that.”
What about instruments?
“I couldn’t afford a guitar – I was 12 or 13. A family makes a hundred dollars a month – that’s it. I saw a B.C. Rich in the hands of W.A.S.P. – Randy Piper’s guitar, with the skull on it. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, fucking hell, this is what I need!’ So I took a jigsaw to my parents’ coffee table and cut out a B.C. Rich Warlock shape from it. I got a second-hand guitar that had a decent neck, and I put together a guitar. It was an unplayable piece of shit, but it was metal. Fast-forward decades: I found Randy Piper’s actual guitar in the hands of a collector, and I bought it.”
Let’s talk about that first journey to the US – that’s a big leap. What was that like for you?
“I was 21 or 22 when I arrived in New York, but I didn’t speak English. Imagine: I show up in New York with a guitar, a bag of clothes, and a Hungarian-English dictionary. No safety net. I had to teach myself English. I stayed in a hotel that was $10 a night. There were cockroaches you could put a saddle on and ride. It was basically a crack house meets a hotel.
I had the only room with its own bathroom; everybody else shared. Questionable characters came in and out. But that’s what I could afford, and you know what? I was happy, because I was looking toward a life I could live in America without restriction, on my own terms. I was excited, regardless of the shitty circumstances.”
How did you learn English?
“Somebody had left a book there – The Shawshank Redemption. I started translating it with the Hungarian dictionary, without understanding grammar or anything. I kept reading it. I had a tiny black-and-white TV, about the size of my laptop, and it had closed captioning. I’d watch shows with the captions on, so I could hear how words were pronounced. Once I spoke English, I’d go to Barnes & Noble – I couldn’t afford books. I could afford a tea, so I’d come in and read, four or five hours a day, every day.”
Did you ever consider a career in something other than music?
“After high school, I ended up going to art school. I got a degree and built a design studio, at the same time as playing guitar. There was a moment when I was on tour – maybe 19, 20 – with a big Hungarian band that played arenas. We were the opening act. The reason we got the slot was that I was designing their stage, their album covers, all of it. We played a place that would be like spring break in America, called Lake Balaton [130km south west of Budapest].
Ivan is the middle finger of this generation – a hand grenade with a loose spring.
Zoltan Bathory
We played there around August 30, the last day of summer before everyone goes back to school. We stayed, and I walked out of my hotel [the day after the shows], and the town that had hundreds of thousands of people partying yesterday was empty. Completely empty. And I thought, ‘I never want to see this again.’ I said: ‘If I’m a touring musician, I’ll never see the after-party again. I am the party. I’m the travelling circus. I’m bringing the fun. That’s the life I want to live.’”
How long were you a designer for?
“Until the band took off, design work supported everything. I was a consultant for the private space industry between 2004 and 2008 or ’09 – I was an interface designer, designing all kinds of crazy shit like space suits. Not the mechanical side, but the look and the vibe. I got to design a suit that went up to the space station. Once the band were big enough, I left the design world behind – but I still do album covers, plus the overall vibe, stage design, merchandise, all that.”
Five Finger Death Punch really took off fast. What’s the secret sauce that made you take off, when hundreds of other bands started in LA the same year and didn’t?
“It’s that whole judo mindset. Everything to me is tactical, everything is a chess game. I look at who’s doing what, and why, and how. And we knew we had a record that was something special. Ivan and I even had a moment when it was done – we were thrashing around in my house, kicking over couches, like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be something.’”
Through the years, there’s been some turbulence. Did you ever consider disbanding Five Finger Death Punch, or parting ways with Ivan? (He has stormed offstage on more than one occasion.)
“Never. 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. I always looked at that as amazing: he’s uncorruptible. I could tell him, ‘Ivan, you’ll lose a million dollars if you don’t feel like doing these shows’, and he’d say, ‘Fuck 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.
“Sometimes I want to kill him. 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. And I’m pretty sure he’s plotting, too – ‘If I could just tie some dynamite to his backpack…’ We’re brothers, but we understand who we are and how to work together, and what’s worth fighting about and what isn’t.”
Your new album’s called Legacy. What do you want your legacy to be?
“A legacy is something you cultivate and build – something that actually affected the world in a way that’s permanent. So that means, 50 years from now, somebody writes a history of heavy metal, and they can’t leave us out of the book. Only a nuclear bomb can erase our legacy at this point.
“And the other part of the legacy is that we built this with the fans. It always was, and is, the people’s band. I can give you stories about how many times people come up and go, ‘Man, you guys saved my life.’ And for us – because we have so many military guys, so many people with PTSD in the fanbase – it’s more real than it is for others.”
Have you had any particularly memorable fan encounters?
“We had a meet-and-greet, and a kid comes in and brings a red ballpoint pen, and he goes, ‘Listen, I’m going to give you guys this pen, because I wrote my suicide note with it.’ This kid obviously had problems – he was, like, 15 – and a friend sent him the music video that had just come out, Coming Down, which was about that very topic, and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m just reaching out, hope you’re doing good.’ So he told us, ‘I’m giving you this pen, because I wrote my suicide note with it, and because of your music, because of your video, I didn’t do it.’ And he gave us the pen. That’s the moment where it’s like, ‘OK, our existence is justified.’
“Now, years later, a man comes into our meet-and-greet and goes, ‘Hey guys, you remember me? I was the kid who gave you a pen that I’d written my suicide note with – the red pen.’ Ivan goes, ‘Holy shit! Hold on a second!’ Ivan runs off, comes back – because to this day, even right now, that pen is in his road case, he carries it everywhere he goes – and he brought it back to the guy. The guy almost had a heart attack – ‘Are you kidding me?’ So that’s one form of the legacy: that we meant something.”
Do you have any regrets, in your life or career?
“Maybe the stress of it. I always worked 150%. People imagine a rock band is stripper poles and disco balls and mountains of whatever drug is your choice. I like the business aspect, because it’s all strategy. But at the same time, it takes time. If I hadn’t stressed, maybe it would’ve worked out anyway. But then again, it’s a butterfly effect. Would I change anything? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t be me; I wouldn’t be here.”
What do you think that 21-year-old who landed in New York would think of the man you are today?
“I purposely try to take myself back there. It’s really important to find a way to ground yourself and not let magical things become the status quo. So if I could go back and give myself a flashback, it would be more like confirmation of my beliefs. It would be exciting – because I was going to go get it anyway, but it would’ve given me extra fuel: here’s a moment of the future, you’re actually doing it.”
Legacy is out now via Better Noise. Five Finger Death Punch tour the UK from January 16, 2027.
