DISTURBED Inducted Into ILLINOIS ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME

DISTURBED was inducted into the Illinois Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on Sunday, September 14th at the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois. The members of DISTURBED were inducted by Frank Mastalerz, who has been in the concert industry, booking and producing shows for over 30 years.

In his acceptance speech, DISTURBED guitarist  Dan Donegan said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "It's been a great honor. We've come a long way from playing in a public storage unit back in the '90s and playing all the great bars — anyone who'd let us play, from Champs to Sidetracked to J.J. Kelley's. And Frank would always be there from the beginning promoting and supporting all local, original bands and still keeping it alive to this day."

Dan added: "But thank you all, thank you to our families, our kids who were a big part of this journey and the sacrifices to allow us to go out on the road and do what we do. And my brothers David [Draiman, DISTURBED singer], Mike [Wengren, DISTURBED drummer], John [Moyer, DISTURBED bassist], who's in Texas right now, and Fuzz [Steve Kmak], our original bass player. Jeff Battaglia, our former manager. And Q Prime, who we are with now. Thank you very much, guys. What a great honor."

Wengren said: "I just wanna say thanks to my kids, our kids, our families, especially the ones that can't be here tonight. Without all of our dedicated fans, we wouldn't be here, especially here in Illinois, Chicago, South Side."

Addressing the fact that DISTURBED was originally supposed to perform at this year's Illinois Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony, Mike added: "And, hey, just for the record, we did wanna perform tonight, but they told us we couldn't 'cause they were worried we were gonna burn their banners down too," apparently referring to reports that pyrotechnics during DISTURBED's March 2025 concert at the United Center in Chicago caused damage to the Chicago Bulls' NBA championship banners.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Donegan, Wengren, of Chicago's Archer Heights neighborhood, Kmak, from Oak Lawn, and Draiman, of Chicago's North Side, formed DISTURBED in 1996 and once lived together in Evergreen Park.

"Back then, we didn't have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We'd work our day jobs, come home and make fliers and cassette tapes and spread out and go to every concert that came to town to promote," Donegan told the Chicago Tribune back in 2016. "All the bands who came up like we did at the time — SOIL, NO ONE, CRASH POET and BALLISTIC — this is what we and our buddies from the South Side had to do to promote. You had to be your own street team or recruit friends to get the word out. I'm not knocking today's technology, but for us that work ethic made us continue to always know that nothing is going to come easy."

Donegan went on to say that DISTURBED and other bands from the South Side had to work harder to be embraced by the fans than the North Side acts.

"The South Side bands were more of the outcasts. That gave us more of a reason to not just push open doors, but knock them down to be heard and taken seriously," Donegan said. "We weren't really welcomed into clubs like the Metro and Double Door. So we made a name for ourselves in clubs like Sidetracked (Lemont),Champs (Burbank),O'Malley's (Alsip) and J.J. Kelley's (Lansing)."

DISTURBED kicked off the U.S. leg of "The Sickness 25th Anniversary Tour" on February 25 at Ford Idaho Center Arena in Nampa, Idaho. The trek celebrated 25 years of DISTURBED's seminal debut album which launched the band into public consciousness and is one of the most important and influential heavy metal albums of all time.

Later this year, DISTURBED will embark on the European leg of "The Sickness 25th Anniversary Tour" with support from MEGADETH.

Since "The Sickness" was released in 2000, the album was certified five times platinum by the RIAA, spent a total of 106 weeks on the US Billboard 200 chart, and Revolver named it one of "Top 25 Debut Hard Rock Albums." Billboard said of the title track upon release: "'Down With The Sickness' is, of course, the quintessential DISTURBED song, harnessing all the band's seethe and its now-famous tribal beat and guitar chug into three and a half minutes of alt-metal mayhem. It's menacing, it's rhythmic, it's rebellious."

In February, DISTURBED released a new single, "I Will Not Break", via the band's own label, Mother Culture Records.