During an appearance on the latest episode of The Mistress Carrie Podcast, DISTURBED guitarist Dan Donegan and drummer Mike Wengren spoke about the musical inspiration for the band’s new single, “I Will Not Break”, which came out on February 21 via DISTURBED‘s own label, Mother Culture Records. Dan said: “We were out in L.A. last fall and just started getting the ideas out. And we had an album’s worth of material already done. And me and Mike and Drew (Fulk, also known as WZRD BLD), our producer, were sitting in the room. And I like to keep going. Once the ball’s rolling, I don’t like to quit — I don’t like to stop, because I always feel like the excitement’s there. You’ve got something new so I keep writing. And David‘s (Draiman, DISTURBED singer) trying to play catch-up, because he’s gotta write all these lyrics to these songs. So a lot of times he wants us to stop because ’cause we’re getting too far ahead of him. And one day I was in the studio, and I was already digging back into old demos that I had at home, old cassette tapes that we had in the ’90s, as we’re going through the vault of things… So I wanted to go back and just kind of get back in that headspace of… Some of those recordings were actually just hitting the ‘record’ button and putting a little cassette player in the back of the room, so it’s the worst quality ever. But I wanted to hear some of those improvised tapes and get in that headspace of where we were back then. And even though ‘I Will Not Break’ is a brand new riff, it kind of just had that vibe.”

Donegan continued: “I was supposed to be tracking guitars in the studio for something else that day and I’m, like, ‘Ah, let’s just put that on the back burner. I just feel like doing something new.’ And we just start messing around a bit and I’m just playing around with this riff for a while. I changed the riff probably 50 times as we were sitting there, and I think when the riff finally came about, I think me, Mike and Drew just looked at each other and were, like, ‘That’s it. That’s the one. Go with that.'”

Dan added: “Cakebread is one of the wines we have backstage here on tour. And we were having that in the studio that night. We opened up a bottle of wine and started improvising. So the working title for the song was called ‘Cakebread’.”

Mike also reflected on the making of “I Will Not Break”, saying: “Dan‘s riffing out, and we’ll loop some beats for him and he just sits there. And he can riff for hours sometimes. Sometimes something comes out in five minutes. Sometimes it comes out in five hours. It had been going around. I’m, like, ‘You know what?’ I’m sitting in the back of the room. I Doordash some wine. The best that the store had on Doordash was Cakebread. So the guy shows up. I crack open the wine. Within five minutes of pouring the glasses for everybody, that riff for ‘I Will Not Break’ came out.”

Asked when DISTURBED fans can expect a full-length follow-up to 2022’s “Divisive” album, Dan said: “We really don’t know. Ten minutes before you walked in the room, we were just talking with our manager too. Our main focus has been this 25th-anniversary tour (of DISTURBED‘s debut album, ‘The Sickness’). We do have a lot of stuff recorded, obviously, with the first single out. There hasn’t really been much talk about the release yet, just because we’re so focused on these tours. It’s hard to think about it when we’re selling out the Garden and all these other places. We’re just riding this wave and we’re on a high right now that there hasn’t been any deep discussion just yet of if it’s coming out this year or next year. We’ve still gotta strategize that.”