FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH guitarist Jason Hook has revealed in a new interview with Billboard.com that the band already has "probably six to eight songs worked up" for its next album and that the group is "probably going to be working on new material all the way up until the New Year, and then we'll start tracking in mid-January, maybe."

"The idea behind that is just to keep the creative muscle worked out," Hook explained. "It's just like going to the gym; if you stop for a year, you lose all your strength. It's easy to get lazy and get sort of soft. We're in the business of making music; touring is great, but we should always be prepared and always exercising that creative muscle — in my opinion, anyway."

He added, "It's just like anything: if you come in unprepared you get what you get, but if you do a decent amount of preparation, then at least you have options. The records are the launch pad for everything else, and I want to make the records great. If we need 10 killer songs, I'd rather have 30 songs to pick from than have eight and need two desperately at the end. I don't want to make records in a panic."

FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's third studio effort, "American Capitalist", arrived less than a year ago in October 2011.

Asked about the hurry to get back into the studio, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH guitarist Zoltan Bathory explained in a recent interview, "I don't believe that a band today can afford to wait two, three, four years with an album, they just can't. So there's no reason, why not give new material, the consumption of music, the consumption of everything is super fast. You give somebody an album and they listen to it and a year later it's obsolete. We thought, 'Let's give them another one, they want to hear the music, we can make the music, then why not.'"

When asked how the new songs stack up to the material on "American Capitalist", Bathory replied, "It's kind of like the band has found its place where we are. We are a melodic heavy metal band and it has its balance. We have some ballads, we have some super heavy songs and everything goes between the big choruses — singable, remember-able — that we grew up on."

FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH is currently headlining the Trespass America tour, also featuring KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, TRIVIUM, POP EVIL and others.