Five Finger Death Punch - A Decade Of Destruction album review

21st-century metal: a lot like 80s and 90s metal

Cover art for Five Finger Death Punch - A Decade Of Destruction album

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Peel back Five Finger Death Punch’s modern metal trappings and you’ll find a straight-down-the-line rock band underneath. This much is evidenced by the cover of Bad Company’s Bad Company that appears on this ‘best of’ album, which tastefully notches up the heaviness rather than galumphing all over it with titanium-plated guitar.

Bad Company is an apt choice for Five Finger Death Punch – the Las Vegas band have positioned themselves as modern-day outlaws, six-string rebels sticking it to the establishment.

They walk it like they talk it on Trouble and Lift Me Up – the latter featuring a cameo from Rob Halford – setting Ivan Moody’s warthog bellow on concrete foundations.

However, there’s an unlikely musical conservatism to The Bleeding and the billowing Battle Born, which owes as much to early Nickelback or prime Queensrÿche as it does Slayer or Metallica. Best of all is Gone Away, which is essentially an 80s power ballad in army camo drag.

It’s at moments like this – when they let the tough-guy mask slip and stop beating their chests to assert their alpha maleness – that Five Finger Death Punch are at their most intriguing. It’s a side you wish they’d explore more in future.

Dave Everley

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.