Last year, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH guitarist Zoltan Bathory told Midland Daily News that he approached the songwriting process for “Judgment Day” with the idea of creating “a soundtrack to the process of dying.” Speaking about his own brush with death, Bathory said: “When you have a near-death experience, a really bizarre thing happens. First and foremost, you’re aware of you’re dying. What happens, the resolution, what you’re hearing, the resolution of your perception, first and foremost it becomes more multi-directional. Humans are very linear because we think in a linear way. We’re born and we die at some point, and I would think the in between is sequential. So we are tied to this timeline and that’s how we think. And in the process of death, that goes away. Somehow time stops… It’s almost like your mind goes up from 10 percent to 100 percent activity and you can remember everything you ever thought at the same time. And then another thing happens. This part is a little bit scary because your perception collapses on yourself. You realize in the moment that everything you ever heard or looked at wasn’t real. It wasn’t real because everything that you see, you’re not actually seeing that. It’s a proton, basically, that impacts your retina. So it becomes electronic information. It travels in your neuro path, in your brain, and your brain will interpret that. It will paint a picture. It’s like if a tree falls in the forest, will it make a sound? No, it cannot make a sound. You make the sound. Your perception makes the sound.”

He added: “In the process of dying, you realize that everything that ever happened, that you ever experienced, happened within your mind. Because that’s where it was assembled. And that’s a scary moment because at that moment you start questioning if anything is real and if you’re alone completely… And I wanted to put that in a song.”

Bathory said that he wrote the music for “Judgment Day” and gave it to Moody to work out his parts for the track.

“I gave the song to Ivan to write the lyrics,” Zoltan recalled. “He freaked out. He said, ‘I’m not writing this song. I don’t want to relive it.’ He immediately got it. ‘I’ve been there. I know what this is. When I die, this is what happens.'”

FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH‘s follow-up to 2020’s “F8”, “AfterLife” was once again recorded at the Hideout Recording Studio, the Las Vegas, Nevada facility owned and operated by Kevin Churko, the Canadian record producer/engineer and songwriter who has worked on all of FIVE FINGER‘s albums beginning with the band’s sophomore release, 2009’s “War Is The Answer”.

“AfterLife” is FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH‘s first album with its latest addition, renowned British virtuoso Andy James, who replaced Jason Hook in 2020. James was previously featured on “Broken World”, a song that was included on the second installment of FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH‘s greatest-hits collection, “A Decade Of Destruction – Volume 2”, which came out in the fall of 2020.