Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Jason Hook is the latest in a long line of musicians to speak out against the incarceration of Lamb OF God frontman Randy Blythe, who is currently being detained in a Prague prison.
Speaking with Loudwire, Hook said: “I think it stinks. I’m reminded how scary life can get and how quickly things can go south. I saw the video and Randy wasn’t even looking at this kid. He was singing to the crowd. Anytime someone comes up on stage, it’s pretty much you get what you get. It’s not like Randy took a heavy object and smashed this guy on the head. Randy was just singing, the guy came up behind him and it looks like he kind of just shoved him off the stage. That’s my take on it. It seemed like a completely innocent maneuver. The fact that the guy perhaps landed on his head and died several weeks later as a result of a bad accident, my guess is they’ll get it figured out and he’ll get off. It doesn’t seem like there was any intentional malice there.”
Hook also spoke about the progress of the band’s follow up album to 2011s ‘American Capitalist,’ saying fans worldwide should expect its release in early 2013. “That’s the idea, yeah. We’ve been writing. On the Share the Wealth tour, we built this portable recording studio. It comes in a case and you pull the lid off and it has everything we need, the whole 9 yards, right? We had a dedicated room in the venue everyday that we could go jam in.”
The idea for the portable studio was inspired by legendary thrash metal band Metallica. “We stole the idea from Metallica, actually. They record everything,” Hook explained. “The idea behind it is to be logging ideas. With heavy metal, a lot of it comes down to good guitar riffs and good drum grooves. We just go in there and jam and document everything. We cut things down to what could be a song arrangement. A lot of times you’re surprised, like, “What is that? Oh, it’s the thing we did two weeks ago? That’s f—ing cool, I can’t believe that’s us!” It’s about a creative flow, it’s all about your gut and your heart. So yeah, to give you an extremely long-winded answer to your question, yeah, we’re preparing material now.”