Ivan Moody recently shared on Facebook the inspiration behind Five Finger Death Punch’s latest music video for ‘Judgement Day’ from the 2022 album ‘AfterLife.’ He commented on the clip depicting him as a vigilante fighting against a group of human traffickers by writing:
“The subject of this video hits home to many and should be above all politics. Any decent human being should be disgusted by the abhorrent fact of in our times, in the 21st century, human trafficking, child trafficking, and slavery exists. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history.”
Detailing this matter through his concerns about his daughter, the singer went on:
“This became particularly poignant and personal when I gave my daughter her first smartphone. I thought about all the safety measures, the possibilities, and the responsibilities that come with giving a young child a phone, especially with internet access. Well, it turned out that it wasn’t the internet I couldn’t prep for… It was the psychological effect of the amber alerts.”
He also mentioned the alerts’ effect on his daughter:
“And when she kept receiving alerts about abducted children, runaways, etc… Well, let’s just say she was deeply affected by it and become so critical in her thinking/paranoid she became concerned about going to school, going out to eat, movies, and how could I blame her…? So, there is my dilemma.”
Delving more into the point, he added:
“I can’t downplay the danger because it’s important for her safety to be informed and know the truth. But how do I explain such an ugly truth without scaring her and introducing even more anxiety into her life? As I said, in the 21st century, this problem should not exist, yet it is a societal issue on a global scale.”
Ending his statement by writing that he decided to use his music and platform to fight against the human and child trafficking issue, Moody also added a link to the music video to his post. On the other hand, Zoltan Bathory mentioned another theme related to the song on other platforms.
According to his interview with Midland Daily News, the guitarist focused on the idea of creating ‘a soundtrack to the process of dying’ while working on ‘Judgement Day.’ He also said that his two near-death experiences reflected on the track’s content during a chat with Finland’s Janne Vuorela:
“In the process of dying, the perception of sound gets kind of weird; everybody gets broken down, almost like you hear the sample rate of your own mind. The sound is not actually continuous, but there are tiny, tiny gaps between. And as your body is shutting down, this becomes very apparent. And so we created the song’ Judgment Day’ and literally built the song around that – like, how does it sound like when you die? There’s a sound; there’s a sound that you hear.”
You can read Ivan Moody’s full post about the ‘Judgement Day’ music video here.
