DISTURBED frontman David Draiman says that he is “itching” to begin work on material for the band’s next studio album.
Draiman, who resides in Hawaii with his wife and their son, discussed DISTURBED‘s plans for the follow-up to 2018’s “Evolution” album while promoting his collaboration with Nita Strauss during a November 2 live chat with the DW Presents Twitch channel.
“I’m very much looking forward to writing with the [other DISTURBED] guys during the downtime in between [gigs],” he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “We have plans to do so. I’m itching — I’ve been itching to do it for a very long time, to get back with the guys that are my writing partners for life.”
Asked if he has to physically be in the same space as his bandmates in order to work on new music, Draiman said: “No, but it’s always best. I mean, you can do it remotely, [but] it’s not recommended for anybody. You’ve gotta have vibe and energy and be in front of the person at some point… It’s always preferred to be in person.”
In October 2020, Draiman told “Loudwire Nights” that DISTURBED‘s new music would be “blisteringly angry” and added that he was “dying” to sink his teeth into “new, original, angry, ferocious, brutal material.”
Four months earlier, Draiman told Download Festival TV that he has spent some of his downtime during the coronavirus pandemic “having conversations with the other guys in DISTURBED about getting some new material going, and we’ve got some stuff in its infancy. One song, definitely, that’s killer in our back pocket; we just haven’t tracked it,” he said. “And we’ve got a few more song ideas, [but] nothing that’s been hashed out enough.”
Draiman went on to say that making music over the Internet had presented its own set of problems, especially since most of DISTURBED‘s last couple of albums were composed with the core members in a room together bouncing ideas off each other.
“We kind of need to get back into the rhythm of being able to do stuff like this in Zoom format or online as opposed to in person,” he said at the time. “At least it’s some kind of real-time connection so that you can be creating together improvisationally to an extent, but there’s still issues with audio — it’s not as clear as you want it sometimes, there’s too much compression and you lose level; it’s a challenge — and the vibe isn’t there. There’s nothing that replaces you being in front of your co-songwriter and being able to feed off each other’s energy and create in person.”
DISTURBED performed live for the first time in nearly two years on September 25 as one of the headliners of the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, Kentucky.
In March, DISTURBED‘s “The Sickness 20th Anniversary Tour” was officially canceled. The amphitheater tour, with very special guest STAIND and BAD WOLVES, was originally slated to take place in the summer of 2020 but was rescheduled to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was eventually scrapped altogether.
“The Sickness 20th Anniversary Tour” was supposed to celebrate the 20th anniversary of DISTURBED‘s seminal album “The Sickness”. On this tour, the band was expected to perform songs off the album, as well as tracks from “Evolution” and DISTURBED‘s extensive catalog.
In September 2020, DISTURBED released a cover version of Sting‘s 1993 single “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You”.
