Disturbed Gear Up for 2027: The Sickness Returns in Full Force

Emerging out of Chicago at the turn of the century with an insidious, infectious, and inimitable vision without comparison, Disturbed have quietly dominated hard rock on their own terms. They make the kind of music that pushes you to hold on tighter, fight harder, and persevere forever. It’s why they’ve claimed a place at the forefront of 21st century rock with record-breaking success, sales of over 17 million units, nearly 14 billion streams, and sold out shows around the globe. The band have six RIAA album certifications, and singles from all eight albums have reached the top ten of the Mainstream Rock charts.

For the first time in over a decade, multi-platinum rock band Disturbed return to New Zealand and Australia, bringing The Sickness & Greatest Hits to seven huge headline shows. Hot on the heels of their massively successful tour across North America, the UK, and Europe, which saw them play in front of over half a million fans, the band will celebrate their seminal debut album, The Sickness, in its entirety, alongside a set of greatest hits spanning their career. Each night, the band will play two sets of music with an intermission in between. The first set will feature The Sickness in its entirety, followed by a full set of greatest hits. Guitarist Dan Donegan talks to Rob Lyon about their return to Australian in 2027.

First headline tour in over a decade, did you start wondering if it will ever happen, especially with the complexities of touring these days?
Yeah, I can’t believe it’s been over a decade. I heard that earlier. I’m like, “Oh my God, how did that happen?” It’s always on our radar. We’ve been coming to Australia throughout our whole career. It’s just a matter of the timing with our booking agent and management of territories we got to hit. It’s a lot of ground to cover. When we did the twenty fifth anniversary last year, we’re like, “Well, we got to bring it to Australia.” So even though we’re going a year and a half, two years late into it, we still felt like we owe it to the fans to give them a taste of that anniversary tour, and that’s why we decided we wanted to do the two‑part, play the whole Sickness album in the sequence of the album, followed by a part two of the show where we’ll just do a handful of other hits throughout our career.

How does it feel coming off a break now? Do you feel refreshed and itching to get back into it?
Oh yeah. I mean, we’ve only done two shows this year in July in the States, and they were great. But it was… yeah, I get too much downtime. I’m like very hyped about coming out and doing this 2027 tour because as much as we were a little tired and wanted to come home and take a break after such a busy year, it doesn’t take long before you start getting stir crazy and you start missing the stage again. We normally don’t take this much time off. But I think everybody needed this coming home, spending time with our kids and everything else, it was a much‑needed break, but it recharged the batteries and made a new game plan for ’27.

Is that hard, being off the road that amount of time and focusing on everything else but music? Switching off completely?
It’s such a contrast, you’re used to foot on the gas pedal and now all of a sudden you slam on the brakes and you come home. When you’re playing for thousands of people every night, and then you come home to a quiet home… it’s quite the contrast. My kids are both in college now, so I’ve gone through that… David’s son is only thirteen and Mike’s got a young son and his daughter, I think seventeen now, so they’re a little bit younger. They’re still home with their kids. My kids are busy in college. I don’t see them as much. So it’s like I have a lot more time where I’m hitting my head against the wall saying, “Okay, let’s go. I’m ready to play, ready to get back out there and tour.” I was fortunate enough early in our career to bring my kids out on the road to a majority of our touring. So they kind of grew up on the tour bus. They’ve been out there. So to go from touring mode to home life and back, it can be a little bit of a whirlwind at times. But I think we’re all collectively very much looking forward to having new music next year, having a new tour next year, and getting back out to your part of the world and just seeing the fans and getting back at it.

An album like The Sickness, are you continually blown away by the legacy that album has built and how much it keeps resonating with fans, even new fans discovering it as part of their own music journeys?
Yeah, it really is amazing. I pinch myself all the time to think the longevity of that album and how much it’s connected with a new generation now too, these younger kids who are just discovering it for the first time. I can just reflect on when we were making the album. I just remember being in the studio. I even remember being in the rehearsal spot when we were writing those songs, and it just blows me away to see how much it’s connected. I mean, anywhere we go, even if I’m out at a local pub or bar or music venue and I hear one of the songs come on and, of course, if somebody recognises that I’m there in the crowd, it’s exciting to see the excitement on their faces, to see that they’re like… all these years that it’s still fun to hear. It’s still fun to play those songs. I was worried about getting tired of playing those songs because I thought these songs are old to us, but still when we play it live, the fans bring that energy and it still makes it exciting to play any of those songs off that album.

At the time, did you ever anticipate how much your life would actually change with that particular album?
I didn’t know. I knew that I felt confident in the material. I felt confident when we were writing these songs because we were still just trying to figure out who our identity was, and just kind of experimenting. It was all natural, and it just kind of developed, and we got our sound and at a time that this whole nu‑metal label was thrown on every band at that time, we just came out at a time where there were so many bands, especially here in the US, that were coming out. We were part of big tours like Ozzfest with Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon back in 2000, and it really gave us that platform to play in front of those big crowds. It was just amazing to see that these songs that were written in a small rehearsal room were starting to connect on a larger scale around the globe.

In terms of how you feel about the album, has that changed over the years?
Um, no. I mean, I mean, some of it, I look back at it and I realise the simplicity of the songs for the most part. It just goes to show you that it doesn’t have to be so complex, complicated and technical. Sometimes it just takes a good hook, something that’s catchy. Like Down with the Sickness is probably the most basic song that we’ve written, and it’s probably one of our biggest hits. So when I look at that, I think like, wow, maybe I overthink it and I try to, as a player, I’m trying to make interesting riffs or maybe a little bit more technical. Then I think, well, Down with the Sickness is as easy of a riff as anything I wrote, and it connects in a big way. It’s become one of our, if not our biggest anthem.

How do you find playing the album start to end? Are there any songs that are harder to play than others, where you think, “We never wrote that to play live,” and it takes adjusting and rehearsal to get it right?
Thank God for YouTube and stuff, because if there’s songs that are more technical or difficult or we’ve gotten away from for a while, I got to admit, sometimes I’ll go on YouTube and I’ll watch fans do a tutorial of one of our songs, and I’ll relearn it from the fan. I’ll be like, “Eh, you know, it’s a lot easier,” instead of me sitting there saying, “What did I do here?” I’ll just watch a fan video and find somebody who could play it right. I’m like, “Hey, he’s teaching me my own song,” you know?

But there’s songs… I think one of the harder ones to play, technically hard just because it’s faster and a lot of down‑picking for me, is the title track Immortalized. A few years back when we released that album, we were opening up with that song. It was the first song in the set. So to come out just swinging, it was something that me and John Moyer, our bassist, we’d be in the dressing room warming up to that because it’s a tough one to start out with. You really got to be warmed up, especially when you want to get all down‑picks in it. So it definitely challenged us, and he would probably say the same. It was definitely one of the more challenging ones because it was so quick.

Is there anything you’d change about the album The Sickness if you had your time over again?
I don’t know. I mean, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I probably overanalysing things a little too much, but everything… the album was our biggest album to date. I just think… I look back at it and yeah, there’s things I could’ve changed or done differently, but I don’t know, I like seeing the growth in it. I like to see that was just an album of us organically experimenting and not second‑guessing anything. We weren’t writing it for anything other than ourselves, like we do with every album. We don’t overthink it. I don’t think about what radio’s going to think of it, if radio’s even going to play it, or at the time when MTV was around here in the States, I didn’t think about any of that. We just wrote songs for us when we were in that room. Was it something that moved us? Could I write a riff that’s going to inspire the guys to add their parts to it? Can I write something musically that’s going to spark with David and inspire him to want to sing to the music I give him? If that sends a chill up our spine, then that’s all we were focused on. We figured if we’re connecting with it and we’re being honest with ourselves, we were just lucky that we found that there’s a fan base that also connects.

The second part of the show is all greatest hits. Without playing three or four hours, it must be tough working out what makes it and what doesn’t?
Yeah, it’s definitely a good problems to have, I guess, right? Because there’s been a number of songs that were number one hits for us that we haven’t played because we have such a deep catalogue. So it’s definitely a good problem to have. We’re very fortunate to know that we still have written songs twenty five, twenty six years into our career, that we haven’t hit a dry spell yet. We still have been creative enough to where it’s working.

Nothing against the bands that live off their back catalogue. I mean, there’s plenty that still can go out and tour and kill it, like Motley Crue and Poison, all they come around and do arena tours. I get it, people are going back because they’re living off the back catalogue of those hits, and they’ve had plenty of them. Things for us have continued to evolve, and we continue to have hit songs. I don’t want to sound arrogant about it, it’s just a fact. Our current songs still climb the charts, and fans are still discovering us.

With the Australian tour, are you looking to perform the entire show, or are you bringing out some bands with you as well?
We plan to have a support act with us. Right now we’ve seen a short list of bands who we would consider bringing over there and we got to look at a lot of factors too. It’s not easy for every band to come overseas. The cost of touring can be very difficult, and who could fit it into their timeframe, because we plan on being over in that part of the world, Japan, Southeast Asia, all that. So it would be close to a five‑week tour. We have to find somebody that can hopefully come over for that length of time and afford to do it. Hopefully we’ll have an answer quickly on that, but we’ve heard a few names. It’s too early for me to throw them around now.

Sounds good. You hinted before that new music is on the horizon. Is it more of what we’ve come to love about Disturbed, or are you looking to push it in a different direction again?
Well, a little bit of both. I mean, there’s definitely those elements of us that we’re always trying to push each other. Like I said, that’s the challenging thing, can we continue inspiring each other to write together? And the answer is yes. We still get excited about the new ideas. There’s definitely those signature things that are Disturbed, the syncopation, the melody, but then the animalistic side of David as well. There’s potentially some collaborations that we haven’t really done much of in the past, other than the last album where we had Ann Wilson from Heart sing on a power ballad with us. That was the first real collaboration we did on a studio album. So there’s a few things in mind, even though we haven’t completed them yet. We’ve discussed a couple collaborations. We figured this deep into our career, there’s a few artists we wanted to try to work with.

It would be remiss not to mention The Sound of Silence. Are you blown away by that one? I think it’s had over a billion streams, those numbers are staggering.
Crazy. Yeah, it’s crazy. I mean, that song just keeps… it’s the gift that keeps on giving. I’ve seen it on so many different things and so many tributes. Seen it on Dancing with the Stars, seen that NASA used it for something, and I think there was an Olympic skating couple thing in the Olympics. It’s just crazy how it’s making its rounds and it keeps coming this many years later.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Disturbed on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…