
  • Anvilicious: The none-too-subtle anti-fascist themes in the Land of Confusion video. Even Draiman once admitted to finding the video strange. Chalk that one up to Todd McFarlane.
  • Awesome Music: Heavy Metal:
    • EVERY. SINGLE. SONG. But especially: Stupify, Awaken, Just Stop, Stricken, Pain Redefined, Inside The Fire, Deceiver, Perfect Insanity, Divide.
    • To clarify, any time you ask a large group of Disturbed fans their favorites, over half of them will list unknown or obscure songs from the back of the albums. This is a five album discography, people. The band is that worshiped by their fanbase.
    • Their new song, Another Way To Die features some of the vocal dynamics hinted at in Deify and Land of Confusion, then turns them Up to Eleven. It starts with a grim vocal crooning opening, then the guitars start booming while Draiman shouts the things people've done to the Earth, building to an epic crescendo while the rest of the band sings back-up, after which Donegan gives us one of his most technical guitar solos is years. This is the kind of song that gets people into Disturbed.
      • From the same album, "Asylum". Now that's Badass, if you don't agree listen to it. It carries so many aspects of Disturbed's distilled style that it may compete with DWTS for Signature Song.
    • OOH WAH AH AH AH!!
      • The drum opening. Oh, God the drum opening. Way to define tribal percussion, Mike.
    • The Night has one of those riffs that's hard not to fall in love with. Then you have David's dramatic bellowing vocals and the tight-as-always rhythm section for a great overall package.
    • The fills in Ten Thousand Fists have just the right level of speed, melody and complexity to become downright orgasmic. Not to mention those catchy strings and David's epic shouting.
  • Awesome Music: Pro Wrestling: Glass Shatters.
  • Base Breaker: Fuzz.
  • Broken Base: Fans of Fuzz vs. fans of Moyer--as far as the Fuzz camp is concerned, Moyer is a mediocre bassist at best and a Replacement Scrappy at worst. Moyer fan argue that the newer bassist is more technically skilled, more useful for his back-up singing and overall better-suited to the band's style. It all boils down to whether you prefer picking or finger-style bass work.
    • There's also the division between the faction that believes The Sickness was the group's best album, and that nothing that came afterwards can compare vs. everyone else.
  • Complete Monster: Draiman, purported for the sake of theatricality. No, he never actually did any of those things mentioned in the trope.
  • Covered Up: Most people who haven't seen Queen of the Damned don't know that Jonathan Davis composed Forsaken. This sprouted from legal difficulties between the soundtrack publisher, Warner records, and Davis' obligations to Sony as a member of Korn.
  • Crazy Awesome: With Dan being the smooth professional, Mike is this by contrast.
  • Ear Worm: How many? Just say all of them. David has an addictive voice and Dan has tone you could never tire of.
  • Epic Riff: Fuzz and Donegan's 'C# G# C# F# A# D#' (Drop C# tuning) riff in Down With The Sickness. Also Indestructible, Guarded, Divide, The Night, I'm Alive, Ten Thousand Fists and Inside The Fire have awesome opening riffs. The solos are strong as well.
  • Fandom Rivalry: With the punk band Finch, and to some degree, The Dillinger Escape Plan.
    • The situation with The Dillinger Escape Plan was mainly based on a misunderstanding, and truth-be-told the DEP has been rather civil about it. Someone informed Disturbed that the group's guitarist had been mocking them for their elaborate stage set-up, when really he was merely making an off-hand remark about how little they themselves bother rehearsing.
      • As the guitarist from DEP put it, when Disturbed use a pyro onstage, they don't get set on fire by it, as has happened at DEP gigs.
    • Draiman has had this to say

 No beef with them. I think the press misquoted them once. We cleared it up.

  • Fanon: There was an old old belief going around that the Believe album's interlocking religious symbols somehow signified the four band members' actual religions. All that's known is that Draiman comes from an Orthodox Jewish background and that Donegan is Irish (and therefore most likely of Catholic descent). Does that mean Fuzz or Wengren are Pagan or Islamic?
    • Despite popular belief, no, it's not Draiman's head on the cover. It was designed by Paul Brown, a graphic designer most known for his work on Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar. He used an old birthing model (found at a flea market, probably formerly of an obstetrician's office), but couldn't find anyone willing to pose for it, so he shaved his head and did it himself. In the words of Draiman:

 "What the hell is that?"

  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the title track Indestructible is considered So Bad It's Good or Narm Charm by many, members of the United States Armed Forces, specifically the Marine Corps have latched on to it as an anthem, taking it literally.
    • For whatever reason, the band's strongest following outside of the U.S. seems to be Oceania, leading them to run one of the longest legs of their Indestructible tour through Australia and bring an entire MAAW IV festival to New Zealand (MAAW V will extend this to the entirety of Oceania). In fact, the band has consistently charted highest outside N.A in Australia and New Zealand[1], with those two being the first places for Asylum to go Gold, faster than the U.S. Amusingly, the band is actually rather popular in Germany (or at least more-so than the rest of Europe).
  • Growing the Beard: The fantastic leap the band made between The Sickness to Believe in terms of musicality, lyrical content and overall quality.
  • Misattributed Song: An unusually high number of people believe they did a song called "Killing You Now". It was actually done by a band called Fear of Sound. Sometimes, it's even misattributed to Tool.
    • "Blood In My Eyes" was a song purported to have been a collaboration between them with Limp Bizkit and Godsmack (the bands have never so much as been in the same room together). The song was made by an indie nu-metal group called Dime Store Hoods.
    • The child abuse segment in Down with the Sickness.
  • Nausea Fuel: Mike took a crash course in why it's not okay to crap in the Minnie Winnie-provided toilets.
  • Never Live It Down: Draiman's quite aware of his status as "The Oh-wa-ah-ah-ah guy"

 "I swear to God, that noise is going to be etched on my tombstone..."

    • The distinctive booming sound to Mike's intro on Down with the Sickness was achieved through applying coated, 2-ply heads to the toms. While he feels this fits with the identity of the song, he's been increasingly trying to get away from this so-called signature sound, as his patterns have become more crisp/developed over the years (he believes the brutal thudding on the early work tended to bury whatever he was playing).
  • Nightmare Fuel: The videos for Inside the Fire, Asylum and The Night.
  • Older Than They Think: Conceived in the late 90's, The Guy is the oldest "The Guy" out there. Try telling this to an I Wanna Be the Guy fan.
  • Painful Rhyme: "Devin, one of eleven". Draiman once joked that 'Devon' had a big family.
    • It's a reference to the statistic that only one in eleven people who attempt suicide succeed. Still a pretty horrible rhyme, though.
      • Draiman has stated that her real name was Suzanne. Try and find a rhyme for that...
    • Also "blood-stained hurricane" but that doesn't stop the awesome.
  • Periphery Demographic: Their target audience is mainly young men, 13-30. Yet the female fanbase has come to at least equal the size of the male portion. They've also weirdly enough found a home with the parents of Disturbed1s (who may have casually heard their kids playing the music) along with the grown-up Disturbed1s' kids (not just adolescent boys who think the swearing is cool, but tots about 6-8 who like the melodies). Finally, they've been accepted by several sects of the the classic/traditional metal children of the 70's who grew up listening to the early speed metal and NWOBHM bands. Because of all this Draiman will sometimes pull children on-stage whenever he notices them singing all the words.

 "I want you to know that as a responsible adult, I don't condone those sorts of words coming out of the mouths of children such as yourself. So, do me a favor, okay: for the rest of the set if you know the songs well enough, and you know a bad word's coming up, earmuffs, okay?"

  • Replacement Scrappy: Averted but still asserted. The Fuzz fans generally preferred Moyer's finger-style bass work, and like to hold the fact that John uses a pick against him (though he can play without one just fine). Other segments don't like how much he seems to follow Dan's lead so much (though Fuzz did this as well). The truth is, he's happened to have some bad luck with recording: on Ten Thousand Fists many of the songs were already thought out (though not written) with rumors that some of the bass lines were written by Fuzz; for Indestructible he had to abruptly leave the session to be with his pregnant wife (keeping in touch through the internet and still been writing bass parts while away), forcing him to play catch-up when he got back[2]. Asylum is essentially the first album that he's been fully present throughout, showing his full ability.
  • So Okay It's Average: Despite its success on the charts and on radio, this has been the common reaction among the Disturbed1s to "Another Way To Die". Opinions range from people who don't like being preached at, people who think it's a decent song but don't believe it deserves single status and people who hate it because of its single status.
    • The reaction towards the subsequent album as a whole. Even fans who loved them for keeping the same sound felt it sounded too much the same and that it was time for something new from the band. A lot of people weren't impressed with the politics and preaching in the lyrics either.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Droppin' Plates can sound stupidly aggressive to non-fans. The song's attitude and total disregard for subtlety is precisely why fans love it.
  • Tear Jerker: Now has its own page.
  • The Woobie: Draiman. The more he reveals the inspiration for his lyrics, the more he becomes this.


  1. Where they also have 4 number 1 albums according to the RIANZ
  2. Truth be told, he says that after hearing them he found Dan's playing rather attractive, wanting to follow it for the sake of the song