Asylum by Disturbed

Asylum, Disturbed's fifth album, came out on Reprise on August 31, 2010, and the Chicago four-piece produced it themselves, with David Draiman, Dan Donegan and Mike Wengren sharing the credit. Draiman roars over Donegan's chugging, stop-start riffs and electronic textures, Wengren pounds like a jackhammer and John Moyer's bass locks the whole machine together.

The band talked about a fresh direction, but this is still unmistakably Disturbed: staccato grooves, bellowed choruses and a singer who sounds permanently at war with something. Much of that war was personal, with Draiman drawing most of the lyrics from his own life in the stretch before the sessions. "Another Way to Die" and "The Animal" were the songs the countdowns held on to. It entered the Billboard 200 at number one on roughly 179,000 copies, their fourth chart-topper in a row, and went gold on March 31, 2011. By October of that year the band had gone on hiatus.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.