He told me one of his closest friends went out on a mission and didn’t make it back. When they were promoting their twin 2013 albums The Wrong Side Of Heaven And The Righteous Side Of Hell, Volumes 1 and 2, frontman Ivan Moody told ArtistDirect, “When we were over in Iraq playing our USO tour, I had one soldier come up to me, and he laid a burnt iPod down on the table. Not only do they employ the imagery of combat in many songs, they also actively support soldiers in a myriad of ways. But 5FDP have taken things much farther than their peers. Even Dream Theater made “The Enemy Inside,” a song about battling PTSD, the first single from their last album. Think Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” think Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes” and “One” think Motörhead’s “Voices From The War” and “When The Eagle Screams” and probably dozens more think Slayer’s “Eyes Of The Insane,” which won them a Grammy. And I have a theory about that audience: I think Five Finger Death Punch have succeeded by building a relationship with listeners in the military, in a way other bands haven’t.Īs long as there’s been metal, there have been metal songs about war, and they’ve frequently expressed solidarity with soldiers. But they’re able to sell 114,000 albums in a week, which means they’re reaching an audience your average blog-friendly metal band can’t even dream of. Critics pretty much hate them (a reaction that’s likely to get worse, now that guitarist Zoltan Bathory has endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Twitter) metal elitists sneer at them and consider them knuckle-dragging, lowest-common-denominator purveyors of post-Pantera crap. This is the band’s third album in a row to hit #2 on the charts 2011’s American Capitalist debuted at #3.įive Finger Death Punch are probably the least cool metal band around right now. However, the Weeknd’s album was streamed many more times, granting him a total of 145,000 “equivalent album units” (10 digital track sales, or 1500 song streams of an album, count the same as an album sold) to 5FDP’s 119,000. Their sixth album, Got Your Six, sold 114,000 albums in its first week the next best contender, the Weeknd’s Beauty Behind The Madness, sold 77,000 last week. If the Billboard Top 200 chart was still based on album sales alone, Five Finger Death Punch would have the #1 album in America right now.
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