Zoltán Báthory is honest that Metallica wouldn’t consider opening for Five Finger Death Punch.
In a new interview with Rock Antenne, the guitarist talked about the metal legends and his band’s future. When asked about touring with Metallica and if he ever imagines Metallica playing before them one day, he replied:
“No. I would say this: Definitely there is something in your mind or in our minds like ‘Okay, one day this is gonna be our stadium that we headline, one day this is gonna be our festival that we headline, and you’ll already be headlining arenas around the world.’ We’re headlining giant festivals but when it comes to stadiums that’s a whole different story. So we play some stadiums on our own, especially in America that we can sell out a stadium, but being [in] a stadium is the next step. Yeah, that comes to my mind like, ‘Man one day probably not in the far future, we’ll be the band that play in stadiums.’”
Though he is sure one day his band will be playing in bigger venues as the headliner, Bathory is also aware that Metallica wouldn’t open for any other band:
“Now as for Metallica, a big opener, no that doesn’t come to my mind. There’s no way in this universe that Metallica would open for everyone. They don’t need to, they don’t want to. It’s the biggest band in the world.”
Bathory’s Experience Of Playing With Metallica
Five Finger Death Punch kicked off their tour journey as Metallica’s opening act on the ‘M72’ tour last August and rocked out at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
At first, Five Finger Death Punch had plans to join Metallica for a string of European gigs in the spring of 2023. However, they had to pull out from those shows to give their singer, Ivan Moody, enough time to recover from his hernia surgery. The band later returned to the tour and are now still performing together.
Back in April, Zoltan had a chat with Audacy Check In, and talked about what the experience has been like for him and his bandmates:
“That’s great. Eighty, ninety thousand people in a stadium, that’s massive. 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.”
He also explained how touring with Metallica affected the fame of the band:
“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 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.”
Watch the interview below.