Oh look, Five Finger Death Punch made a bad lead single again.

“Inside Out” – Five Finger Death Punch

Mainstream Rock
#1 peak (4 weeks, February 8^th – February 15^th, 2020, February 29^th – March 7^th, 2020)
#3 year-end

Ok, we all get it.  Five Finger Death Punch have become a joke with their constant streams of drop B chords and bitter, angry lyrics.  To be fair, they weren’t always a bad band.  Or at least, completely bad.  Last year I completed their 2009 album War Is The Answer and no joke, it wasn’t bad.  It demonstrated their potential with songs like “Hard To See,” “Walk Away,” “Far From Home,” and their cover of “Bad Company” (Five Finger Death Punch made a good cover song!  Crazy, I know!).  But they hit a low point with their 2015 album Got Your Six, and then hit rock bottom on their 2018 album And Justice For None.  And Justice For None has one of the worst one-two-three opening punches an album has ever had: The laughably bad “Fake,” the identical sounding “Top Of The World,” and “Sham Pain,” another godawful track that somehow made it to number one on the Mainstream Rock chart even with the immortal line, “Blabbermouth can f**king suck it cause they never f**king knew me.”

There was one hitch to the album, however.  It was recorded in 2016 and 2017 and shelved for a year when frontman Ivan Moody angrily announced at a show in the Netherlands that he was quitting Five Finger Death Punch, before checking himself into rehab.  So Ivan wasn’t sober when he wrote the album’s horrendous lyrics, or any of their other songs for that matter.  So here it was.  Five Finger Death Punch was going to reinvent themselves for their 2020 album F8, their first album made with Moody completely sober.  Maybe they would finally get it together and make their first good album in an eternity.  Maybe a kinder Moody would stop writing so much about how awful people were to him and demonstrate his humble side for a change.  When the album was released in February, I took a brief listen to the song’s first 30 seconds on Spotify.

I heard the same drop B chord I had heard in a zillion previous 5FDP songs and more lyrics about Moody whining about everything.  I stopped listening until December, when I had to revisit the song in full for this list.

So, um, yeah.  “Inside Out” is the five billionth rehash of “Under And Over It,” a 5FDP song from way back in 2011.  Songs like “Lift Me Up,” “Fake,” and “Top Of The World” sank because they were so obviously based on “Under And Over It” in sound and presentation, with the same stupid drop B chord powering the song.  The only difference in “Inside Out” is that the rhythm is slightly slower.  It has to be said… I have never seen a band evolve less over time than Five Finger Death Punch.  AC/DC, a band known for playing the same song over and over again, has evolved more.  At least they play different notes than B.  Five Finger Death Punch try to differentiate it by adding a string section and another Jason Hook guitar solo, but all those do is add small nicks to the song when contrasted to the constant riffing.

And yet again, the lyrics are terrible.  Moody has explained that this song is about his experience with rehab and how he has viewed the world since overcoming his addiction.  Well, it sure doesn’t sound like it.  This is the opening line:

TAKE IT!  I DON’T NEED IT!
I DON’T WANNA HEAR YOUR MOTHERF**KING SIDE!

So the way Moody overcame his alcoholism was… whining and complaining how everyone was being mean about him when he was struggling with alcoholism.  Like, you didn’t realize that you were wrong?  Ever?

Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t understand
While I’m sitting up here dying, you’re just holding out your hand

Even though you publicly admitted that you needed help, you are saying that the help people gave you was useless and a weak response for a major problem.  Given where you were in life, wouldn’t you take all the help you could get?

I stand alone
Guess I knew it all along
Yes I knew that you were wrong
How you left when I was down

What do you mean, you knew they were wrong?  Weren’t you wrong for letting your addiction to alcohol consume you to the point that you were an absolute wreck?  And who was leaving you when you were down?  Weren’t people supporting you when you were in rehab?  Your band, perhaps?

There’s no denying it, I’ve always had control

Sure doesn’t sound like it.

You would think that with Moody finally overcoming his demons and the band coming off their worst album yet, they would finally buckle in and really go for some change on this record.  And they put out the same song they always have.  A song with more lazy and uninspired songwriting, from its rehashed music to more lyrics with vague complaining about someone else.  The only positive I can give this song is that it’s still better than “Fake,” which escalates the basic complaining to pure comedy gold.  Speaking of which…

SOURCES

Redrup, Zach.  “NEWS: Ivan Moody Calls Tilburg His ‘Last Show’ in Five Finger Death Punch!”  Dead Press 13 June 2017.  Web.  31 December 2020.

Hartmann, Graham.  “Five Finger Death Punch’s Ivan Moody Breaks Silence On Sobriety, Alcohol-Related Seizures & More.”  Loudwire 14 May 2018.  Web.  31 December 2020.

IMAGE SOURCES

“Inside Out” single cover from Wikimedia

Photo of Five Finger Death Punch from Loudwire