“It’s just like music to your ears.”
All artists are unique and inspirational in some fashion or another. In the metal space, if there’s any band that’s influenced an entire generation of neckbeards that brandish a Punisher decal across the back of their Dodge Ram trucks and have an incomparable ability to suck exponentially more with each release, it’s none other than Dollar Tree-variety Pantera. Before anyone gets roid rage, that was a joke (sarcasm). Five Finger Death Punch, for many indiscernible reasons, have kept a one-trick pony of a musical career going for nearly twenty years. With their tenth and self-proclaimed bequest record, it’s truly fitting that this should be their laziest and most bland album to date, against an impossibly low bar at that. Chalk it up as another milestone for the bastard child of Disturbed and Nickelback with an Iraqi War memorabilia fixation. Gleaming with Anthropic-accredited artwork and a treasure trove of half-baked arena rock (no, not metal), stands the culmination of FFDP‘s two-decade insistence on not going away and leaving us all alone, Legacy.
Down-tuned instrumentals, high school linebacker lyrics, giga chud persona, and covers of already-famous songs that are unsurprisingly better than any original material have been FFDP‘s bread and butter since The Way of the Fist, and almost all of that continues on Legacy. Now, that isn’t to say there aren’t sporadic moments of catchy riffs and chugs, but they don’t last very long compared to FFDP‘s formulaic defaults. “De Oppresso Liber” and “Eye of the Storm” best exemplify this, yet are quickly deterred by templatized guitar solos and Ivan Moody sounding like a kid picked last in gym class. In essence, Legacy is a mere rehash of previous material that violated willing and unwilling eardrums alike for years and serves to push any stragglers left to the brink of registering for audible therapy.
In a rare instance, there are no cover songs present this time around for FFDP, which is unfortunate if you hate yourself enough to be convinced anything else made by them is serviceable. Despite that, some tracks do mirror other bands rather effectively. “Shelter” is remarkably similar to much of Parkway Drive‘s Darker Still (derogatory) in all its quasi-whispering glory, whilst “In Time” is a cheap imitation of Breaking Benjamin (who actually make good music) on the grounds of divorced restraining order dad rock. Even when the line is toed between covering someone else’s material and a scrambled parroting of superior music, FFDP, without fail, manages to contrive something that Alex Jones with an FL Studio free trial could cobble together in a matter of minutes. What’s more, FFDP always find the most superficial song names possible, devoid of the slightest hint of irony (see “Joke’s on Me” and the Staind-worship acoustic ballad “Everybody Lies“).
In every regard, Legacy is flat out mundane to the point where it couldn’t even be labeled a nothingburger, but rather an indictment of the music industry’s unwavering penchant for promoting tasteless output again and again. Mind you, FFDP has received numerous accolades over the course of their tenure (as if the collective outlook towards corporatized entities couldn’t sink any further). To the Redditors reading this, FFDP is the result of rewarding mediocrity and anything lesser without hesitation for the sole purpose of filling an obligatory checkbox by saying, “Look! We included a ‘metal’ act this time around in our award ceremony!” Either suits really are oblivious to everything around them, or FFDP has given them a cut of the knuckle lion jersey merch profits. When hearing tracks such as “Nails in the Coffin“, minor variations of WWE butt rock are supposedly all that’s needed to attain popularity these days.
Well, are there any good things to say about this record? Sure; it eventually comes to an end, and what better way to do so than with a track like “Scapegoat” that amalgamates all of FFDP‘s worst qualities. The familiar verse/chorus/verse/bridge solo/outro chorus structure is strong with this one, amplified by shining examples of how not to write lyrics. Between “The rope you’re on, I’m cutting it loose… CUT!” and “I’d tell ya all about it, but it’d ruin the book” on the record’s opener, Moody at least does everyone the noble service of showcasing the truest of poetic antipatterns. Shame isn’t anywhere to be found in this group, and given FFDP decided to recalibrate the chode meter by utilizing AI art, they could’ve stood to leverage that same LLM to generate words with substantially more creative prowess in place of Moody‘s recycled diary passages. Still, the aforementioned is more conducive to wishful thinking; “Claude, give us lyrics about being a real man and overcoming our inner demons.” Maybe there was solace to be found in this after all. Want to write an album? Do the exact opposite of what was done here. All it requires is abstaining from PEDs and a fractional sense of self-awareness.
Legacy is as aptly named an album as there could possibly be for FFDP. A vicious circle of overproduced hooks, tough-guy cosplaying, and robotically anthematic choruses could only lead to an entry that outstinks every preceding pile of shit dumped on the masses beforehand. FFDP‘s boomer-sympathetic elegies have somehow remained popular all along, so perhaps others just know something we don’t. Nevertheless, FFDP‘s albums will continue to achieve commercial success for as long as people eat it up. In case you hadn’t heard, diarrhea has apparently been on the menu for a long time now. At this rate, the only lasting impact FFDP are on pace to have is encouraging people whose entire wardrobe consists of Red Bull shirts that blatantly laddish facades are the keys to prosperity, when it’s actually eternal virginity.
