Nu Metalers Disturbed have dropped the second single from their eighth studio album, Divisive and a groundbreaking video to accompany it.

Disturbed is no stranger to animated videos, with “The Vengeful One” and their cover of the Genesis classic, “Land of Confusion”, but this new video steps up and into the future by using artificial intelligence.

The band tapped director Tristain Holmes who used Midjourney AI image generator to create 10,000 images that were then pieced together to tell the story of “Bad Man”. According to Holmes, who is also a fan of Disturbed, completion of this project took close to a month.

“This is a very fluid process. It’s definitely not a process where you put something in once, and then you get this result that’s a perfect expression of what you intended. It’s a lot more to-and-fro-ing. It’s kinda like a weird game of tennis, or you can imagine it as a conversation where you’re constantly recalibrating prompts and shifting orders of words and changing references and nuances and style settings… It takes weeks!”

It wasn’t just creating the images, he had to create prompts and code to make it all work, and the work, is remarkable.

“Bad Man” was lyrically inspired by Russia’s invasion and ongoing war with Ukraine.  In a recent interview with Lou Brutus on Hard Drive, frontman David Draiman said:

“It could be about any number of bad men or actors in the world that are currently wreaking havoc, but this particular song was inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was happening as we were writing the song, and it seemed very, very appropriate. I feel for the people of Ukraine and everything that they’ve had to deal with and experience and are continuing to experience. It’s horrific to watch the play-by-play of a full-scale war. And it’s a shame that it’s become just a matter of, like, ‘Oh, this is what we do. We check in to see what happened.’ As opposed to — I don’t know — doing more as a world, other than just throwing tons of money at the situation and contributing to more death and violence. I wish there was more that we could do as a planet to just apply enough pressure in the right places from the right people to make the madman stop.”

 

You can learn more about the creation with this behind-the-scenes video