DAVID DRAIMAN On DISTURBED's New Music: 'We Really Wanted To Go Back To Where We Came From'

At last month's Welcome To Rockville festival in Daytona Beach, Florida, DISTURBED frontman David Draiman spoke to SiriusXM's Shannon Gunz 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): "This past week has just been amazing for the DISTURBED camp — like, amazing for the DISTURBED camp. We have been writing, and it is sick — it is absolutely sick. It is old-school DISTURBED. It's groove, it's power, it's ferocity, it's polysyncopation — it's all those things that people have known us for since day one. We really wanted to go back to where we came from — our meat and potatoes, so to speak. We came up with six new song ideas this week. We have two in our back pocket. We're gonna look to start actually tracking them for real sometime after the New Year, and we are incredibly excited. The material is big."

Prior to DISTURBED's appearance at Welcome To Rockville, Draiman told Lou Brutus of HardDrive Radio that the band will likely do things slightly differently with the upcoming release. "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".