David Draiman of DISTURBED, which recently played its first pandemic-era shows, spoke to Lou Brutus of HardDrive Radio about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the band’s follow-up to 2018’s “Evolution” album. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “It’s on in a big, big, big fucking way. It really, really is. I mean, we are so genuinely excited.
“They asked me going in, ‘Where do you wanna go with this?’ And I’m, like, ‘I wanna go back. I wanna go back to our meat and potatoes. I wanna go back to where we came from.’
“The week in between the Indiana shows and the [Welcome To Rockville] show was amazing,” Draiman added. “We pumped out six new DISTURBED songs. They are rhythmic, they are anthemic, they are polysyncopated, they are meat-and-potatoes DISTURBED. It’s somewhere between ‘The Sickness’ and ‘Ten Thousand Fists’ as far as vibe. And it’s can’t-stop-but-bob-your-head kind of thing. I couldn’t be more happy. And we’re so genuinely excited that we don’t wanna wait. We’re gonna track it after the New Year. We’re guns blazing right now.”
Asked if DISTURBED has already decided on a producer and studio for its upcoming sessions, Draiman said: “We’re still trying to suss all that out. We’ve written with a couple of guys. We’re trying to just kind of go wherever we’re gonna be able to find a little spark of inspiration here and there. So we’re still trying to suss everything out.
“The way that I see it happening is we’re probably not gonna put out something in the traditional full-length; we’re probably gonna be doing two separate releases,” he explained. “So we’ll probably have one geared for release — if everything works as planned — by the fall, and then maybe something the following year as well.”
When Brutus asked Draiman to clarify if that means that the next DISTURBED release will be an EP, David said: “Define it what you want, but it would like five or six songs at a pop — something like that.
“We live in an environment right now and in an age where people’s consumption of music has been very soundbitish and very track-driven and very single-driven,” he continued. “And there’s definitely some beauty towards continuing to try and [make] things like concept records and telling a long story over the duration of a series of songs — there’s huge merit to that — but I think that when you write 10 songs and three of them actually get worked at radio and maybe, if you’re lucky, the fans are really familiar with half the record and the rest ends up sitting on a shelf, and if you do end up pulling it out one day, it’s like an obscure, weird moment during the set, and it’s almost like gratuitous for yourself. I don’t wanna do that anymore. I wanna make everything count. I wanna make sure that we get the biggest bang for everything we’re putting out there. I think that that should be easily attainable. It seems to be where the environment is going, and it seems to be — whether we like it or not — what the digital age has funneled us into.”
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.”
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”.
