Disturbed: A Chicago Band That Changed Rock Music
Before that fateful day in 1996 when he responded to a singer-wanted ad placed by a Chicago rock band, David Draiman was on the path to becoming a rabbi. Within a few years of passing that audition, though, he was leading a different kind of congregation—the five million metalheads who bought The Sickness, the 2000 debut album from his band, Disturbed.
Announced by the “oh-wah-ah-ah-ah” heard ‘round the world, the album’s breakout single, “Down With the Sickness,” injected nu-metal’s industrial-strength crunch with old-school hard-rock attitude, expanding the genre’s capacity for outsized angst while forsaking its hip-hop/electronic affinities for pure pummel. But while Disturbed will be forever associated with nu-metal’s millennial golden age, they’ve soundly transcended it.
From 2002’s Believe up through to 2015’s Immortalized, Disturbed clocked five consecutive No. 1 albums, never losing their aggressive edge, but gradually revealing the full emotional breadth of Draiman’s growling-to-graceful vocal range and bringing their classic-rock influences to the fore.
On Immortalized, the band scored the biggest international radio hit of their career with a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” recasting the ‘60s folk-pop ballad as a harrowing gothic hymn—a perfect emblem of this band’s capacity for transforming the sacred into the sacreligious.
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