FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH has released the official music video for the new song "Sham Pain", off the band's upcoming seventh studio album, "And Justice For None". According to guitarist Zoltan Bathory, the track is "a lyrical snapshot of probably the most chaotic, yet the biggest year of our career. So far, we've come out of every bear attack relatively un-scraped, and the band is tighter than ever. Life is not so difficult if you don't take yourself sooo seriously. As long as you can find the humor in everything, you are winning and the winning is strong with this video, as it follows the footsteps of our NOscar-winning masterpiece 'Jekyll And Hyde'. It was a simple process: We lit the set on fire and then made our poor director Rob Anderson's artistic sense into a piсata. Whatever he could salvage became the music video."
"Sham Pain" sees FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH frontman Ivan Moody spitting out such lines as "my label tried to sue me, TMZ tried to screw me, Blabbermouth can fucking suck it, 'cause they never fucking knew me," a reference to a particularly event-filled 2016 during which the band was sued by its record label, Prospect Park, and a woman claiming to be Moody's wife accused the singer of infidelity and being violent during their relationship.
FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's follow-up to 2015's "Got Your Six" was originally delivered to Prospect Park in December 2016, but a legal battle with the company delayed the LP's arrival.
Last fall, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH settled its lawsuit with Prospect Park and released a greatest-hits collection with two new songs.
Due on May 18, "And Justice For None" is available for pre-order in the following formats: standard physical CD (13 tracks), deluxe physical CD (13 tracks + 3 bonus tracks + deluxe artwork), vinyl (13 tracks + 3 bonus tracks + deluxe gatefold artwork). The band is also offering fans a variety of new CD/merchandise bundles.
Bathory told Detroit radio station WRIF that the title of FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's new album was inspired by the group's legal battle with Prospect Park. Bathory explained: "There was this back-and-forth forever, and finally when we settled, I think Ivan was the one who said, 'Well, I guess that's justice for none.' And we were, like, 'Let's call the album 'And Justice For None'.'"
Bathory acknowledged that the band picked that title even though METALLICA released an LP called "…And Justice For All". He added, "We all know there's [the] METALLICA album... And [those] lyrics, actually, METALLICA's '…And Justice For All', make a lot of sense to me. The same crap 30 years later, right?"
Asked if the band changed any of the LP during the past year, Bathory replied, "We ended up recording a couple of more songs that was part of the agreement with the label; we recorded three more songs for the album that was part the settlement."
Bathory said about the "And Justice For None" music: "We have a sound, and we're not gonna really go far away from that. We sometimes experiment, but we have a sound. And for us, it's always about writing the song — the song is what matters the most to us."
In May 2016, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH announced it had signed a new North American recording deal with the BMG-owned rock label Rise Records.
FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH will hit a handful of festivals and play around a dozen dates with SHINEDOWN this spring. The band will then kick off a co-headlining run with BREAKING BENJAMIN on July 16 in Seattle.