Two years ago, there was good reason to wonder if Five Finger Death Punch was on the ropes as a band.
During a European tour in summer 2017, the band essentially did an intervention, sending singer Ivan Moody home, hoping that this trip to rehab would help the vocalist beat a long-running alcohol addiction that had reached life-threatening proportions. The band brought in Bad Wolves singer Tommy Vext to fill in for the remaining dates on the tour.
To say that was a difficult, stressful and just plain scary time for the band would be a classic understatement.
“It’s really heartbreaking. Think about it . This is somebody that we dug the trenches with together. We tried everything, and you come to the conclusion that if we don’t do this, he’s going to die. He’s going to be one of the headlines,” guitarist Zoltan Bathory said, recalling the morning he, drummer Jeremy Spencer, guitarist Jason Hook and several other members of the band’s inner circle woke up Moody to get him on a plane for the trip to rehab.
The incident that finally forced the band’s hand happened onstage the night before. As Moody revealed in a 2018 interview with radio station WZOR in Northeast Wisconsin, he had been drinking throughout the European tour. He got so wasted the previous night that he was woken up by his personal assistant telling him he had 10 minutes before he was due onstage.