How long have you been down with Disturbed’s sickness?
Ever since the release of the Chicago quartet’s mega-selling 2000 debut album, The Sickness, David Draiman and Co. have been a major fixture of the heavy-music landscape.
That record instantly thrust the band into the limelight as a tentpole of the nu-metal era, with guitarist Dan Donegan writing numerous riffs as beefy as the band’s ultra-jacked, curiously cowled but permanently shirtless mascot, “The Guy.” While Draiman’s tunefully raspy yowl and beast-from-within growling were likewise a force to be reckoned with, no one could have guessed how omnipresent one particular “Ooh, wah-ah-ah-ah” of his would be a quarter century later.
But with eight full-lengths in their discography and more than 15 million albums sold worldwide, there has to be more to the band than just that one ever-iconic onomatopoeia. So, we asked Revolver readers to raise their ten thousand fists to rank the biggest hits of the Disturbed catalog.
These were the top five vote-getters.
“Voices”
“I’m gonna talk about some freaky shit now.”
That’s a hell of a premise Draiman puts forth in the first verse to The Sickness’ third single, “Voices.” And while the vocalist doesn’t quite a blow-by-blow rundown of the in-song narrator’s apparent spiraling towards insanity, it’s suggested that “someone is gonna die” by the end of the song.
Draiman contorts his voice from panicked howls towards menacing whispers, while Donegan interjects throughout with his bloody-knuckled, huge-attitude nu-riffage. All told, their “Voices” stands as one of Disturbed’s most impressive conversation starters for the fanbase.
“Stricken”
“Stricken” is the second single from the Disturbed’s gold-selling Ten Thousand Fists, which was also the band’s second album in a row to debut at the top of the Billboard album chart. You could argue that it’s an aggressive follow-up in another sense, too — just as the act launch into the brawny, nu-grooving intro, Draiman steps up to the plate to deliver a familiarly sick, signature “Ooh, wah-ah-ah-ah.”
While it features a crowd-pleasing callback, “Stricken” nevertheless stands on its own two feet as a melodically bruising anthem for the heartbroken, Draiman going on to detail the emotional wreckage of being left out to dry following a “bloodstained hurricane.”
For fans, this one still hurts so good.
“Prayer”
The “Prayer” video was pretty controversial when it dropped in the spring of 2002. Released barely a half-year on from the 9/11 attacks, Disturbed were seen in the clip playing the percussively-chunky rock anthem in a city ravaged by apocalyptic fires, with folks also being crushed by falling debris the whole way through. Disturbed were asked to re-film the clip, but they declined to alter their artistic vision.
The song plays out as a conversation between Draiman and God and features biblically doomsday-adjacent themes, but it also acts as heavy anthem about persevering through bad times. In other words, it’s an inspirational “Prayer” a lot of Revolver readers have turned to over the years.
“The Game”
While the music world is still super obsessed with the iconic and endlessly memeable “Ooh, wah-ah-ah-ah” that fully sets off “Down With the Sickness,” Disturbed’s debut album actually has Draiman delivering more than a few onomatopoeically-intriguing moments. Take “The Game,” where an industrialized intro of tensely swirling synths gets rudely interrupted by both one of Donegan’s funkiest and thrashiest riffs, and a gnarly, Draiman-delivered “RAH, RAH!”
While the vocalist worries in-song that he’s not “getting through to you,” the past quarter century has proved that “The Game” has become a nearly unbeatable fan favorite. It nabbed a lot of votes in this poll, for instance, and it’s likewise the third-most-performed piece in Disturbed’s entire catalog — behind only “Down With the Sickness” and “Stupify.”
“Remember”
Draiman has called “Remember” one of his faves from the band’s early era, with the Disturbed frontman having noted in an interview that the second single off 2002’s Believe displays the group’s “highest level of musicianship, complexity and sense of melody while still fusing it with the power hopefully that we’ll come to be known by.” Clearly, the voters agree.
While the cut ultimately homes in on the head-bobbing nu-rock feel of a lot of Disturbed songs, it also goes for broke in the verse with a twitchily-progressive, zig-zagging meter.
Paraphrasing the verse, a surreal sensation washes over the Disturbed Ones when they hear “Remember.” That’s why it’s one of the band’s most unforgettable hits.