Manipulating Social Media With White Lies And A Smokescreen

Disturbed's new album Immortalized arrives after a four-year hiatus. During downtime, singer David Draiman formed Device and also enjoyed quality time with his young son. After a much-needed breather, the band regrouped and re-evaluated their creative process. The mega-selling American metallers hadn't written in the same room together since 2002's Believe. "We will never go back to just sending Wav files back and forth to one another and throwing them in a Pro Tools session," he enthuses. "There is such chemistry, and such undeniable creative force between us."

In this iPhone camera-clutching age, eradicating what little mystique still surrounds artists, it's an impressive feat that the quartet kept its creation under wraps until announcing the impending release. Draiman is in Chicago amid rehearsals for their "hometown" record release show and laughs, "A lot of white lies, non-disclosure agreements and pissed off friends and relatives," went into keeping the recording sessions secret. "A little sleight of hand, and utilising social media to throw a false flag here and there. The other thing was making the record in Vegas gave us instant plausible deniability, because it's not the strangest thing to see the guys from Disturbed hanging out in Vegas." 

"It's just time for me to be the frontman of one of the most powerful bands on the face of this planet."

Although Draiman personally recently withdrew from all platforms, they collectively applied social media for misdirection. "To plant the seed of doubt even further, Dan [Donegan, guitars] and Mike [Wengren, drums] were travelling back home every other week nearly, and so they'd make sure to post from their respective social media pages while they were home. So even if somebody did see us in the same place at the same time, they'd look online and say, 'Dan was just in Chicago,' or 'Mike was just in Milwaukee, but Dave's in Vegas, so they can't be making a record together because they're not in the same place.' We tried to use those things to our advantage to try and continue to perpetuate the smokescreen. Thankfully, it worked."

What of the individual decision to forgo it? Initial reports claimed it attributable to the weariness of being baited about his sometimes-controversial opinions by Twitter trolls. "It was taking time away from my family, it was... a source of contention almost," he laughs. "I enjoyed the interaction while it lasted, but I've been a big mouth long enough. I think it's just time for me to be the frontman of one of the most powerful bands on the face of this planet." 

He'll soon have that opportunity on a grand scale. The aforementioned release show is their only gig of 2015, although there are major plans in the pipeline. Australia's in the works for early 2016, but Immortalized's tight-lipped nature limited scheduling in advance. "Part of the problem with keeping something a secret for so long is that you can't plan for it until it's no longer a secret," Draiman laughs. "It put us into a situation where we knew we were going to have to wait for things to be finalised. I think we're gonna go a little nuts, probably even more so than the fans, because now we have all this new heavy ammunition to fire off, we want to use it," he chuckles. "It's a little maddening, but I think we'll hopefully survive."