You are likely already familiar with the dynasties that have dominated the Billboard pop charts. There is Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which landed seven singles in the Top 10, or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, an album that remained in the Billboard 200 for most of the 1970s and ’80s. More recently, Taylor Swift’s indomitable reign of terror culminated with all 31 songs from her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, landing somewhere in the Hot 100.
This all makes sense: Pop music runs on stardom, and it’s no surprise that a small cadre of A-listers in the industry dominate the raw numbers. However, if you’re in the mood for an underdog story—a David to Taylor’s Goliath—I recommend perusing Billboard’s Hard Rock Digital Song Sales chart. It is home to, genuinely, one of the most substantial feats of endurance in the history of popular music, and it shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. I speak, of course, of Disturbed’s cover of the Simon & Garfunkel classic “The Sound of Silence,” which has been at, or near, the apex of that chart since 2015.
The cover is exactly as advertised. Disturbed, a band best known for butt-rock slop that scored dozens of energy drink commercials in the mid-2000s—particularly “Down With the Sickness,” the infamous “OOH-WAH-A-A-A” song—approach “The Sound of Silence” with respectful indebtedness, and no artifice whatsoever. The composition swaps in a forlorn piano for Simon’s gentle acoustic guitar and fills in the eerie negative space of the master track with a glistening string section. It possesses the same cinematic intensity that the original “The Sound of Silence” did, though Simon & Garfunkel’s version is best suited for The Graduate, while Disturbed’s take seems tuned for the end-credits scroll of a Transformers flick. Most importantly though, the cover doesn’t really resemble a Disturbed song—which all tend to be brawny, overcooked, and temporally restricted to the aesthetics of the first Bush administration.
On that basis alone, I’m not surprised it turned out to be a hit, but if you’re going by Billboard’s loose definition of the term, it’s also the most popular hard rock song of the past 10 years. The track appeared on the Hard Rock Digital Song Sales chart at No. 4 a decade ago, and hasn’t dropped lower than 25 since. Between Feb. 13, 2016, and March 11, 2017, it sat at No. 1, and since November of 2023, it has rarely left the top five. While it does occasionally get bumped out of the top spot, Disturbed always manages to rebound. Last August, “The Sound of Silence” swooned to No. 8, but by the first week of 2025, it had claimed its rightful mantle once again. At last, these alt-metal mediocrities have engraved their name into the canon, and they have done so in a way that is completely out of their character.
“Certain artists get flattened into one song standing in for their entire catalog. It’s conceivable that 30 years from now, Mariah Carey will be mostly remembered for ‘All I Want for Christmas,’ despite the fact that she has 18 other No. 1 hits and she was the single biggest pop star of the 1990s,” said Chris Molanphy, host of Slate’s Hit Parade podcast and one of the foremost chart analysts working in the media. “Disturbed were once thought of as quite demonic. The band still scores hits on the Mainstream Rock chart. But in a way, for Disturbed, their cover of ‘The Sound of Silence’ is kind of their Christmas carol.”
All of that is true, but we do need to cover a few caveats. First things first, what, exactly, is the Hard Rock Digital Song Sales Chart? According to Kevin Rutherford, who oversees Billboard’s rock charts, the ledger specifically tracks the week-to-week download sales of all songs deemed to be hard rock. So, in other words, “Hard Rock Digital Song Sales” does not factor in any data gathered from Spotify, Tidal, or any other streaming service. That amounts to a fairly niche subdivision of the total market. “The volume is much lower. In terms of what goes into our other charts, like the Hot 100—digital sales is the smallest component of it,” said Rutherford.
This is likely why the top of the chart is fairly static. There simply aren’t many hard rock songs arriving in 2025 that move the needle, and oftentimes, “The Sound of Silence” is going head-to-head with some truly ancient throwbacks. (When I’ve perused the list over the past few months, often AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is bobbing around the Top 10. That song came out 35 years ago.) It also cannot be understated how few downloads an artist actually needs to sell to make a dent in these streaming-excluded registers, considering how just about everyone in the United States has made peace with the low bitrates of Spotify. “A few thousand copies are enough to top this chart,” added Molanphy. “This ‘Sound of Silence’ cover sells a thousand to two thousand downloads a week, and it never cracked the pop Top 40.”
That said, Molanphy does find the stamina of Disturbed’s cover to be pretty remarkable, “It’s the long-distance runner of hard rock songs. It’s accruing its popularity week by week. Cumulatively, it sold 2.15 million copies. That’s pretty staggering,” he said. It’s even more impressive when you contextualize those metrics with the rest of Disturbed’s career. The band reached its cultural saturation point in 2000 with the release of its debut record The Sickness, which moved 4.2 million copies in the United States in the aughts, eventually going quintuple platinum. Disturbed has never quite matched that commercial ubiquity since, but the five albums that followed The Sickness all hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. And that makes it all the more comic that such a genuinely successful run is being totally eclipsed by a Simon & Garfunkel song.
For what it’s worth, Disturbed has always flexed a reverence for pop music that falls well outside the contours of its gray-and-black palette. On 2005’s Ten Thousand Fists, the band covered Genesis’ “Land of Confusion”—swapping out heady synths for steely, machine-gun guitar riffs. (The song made it all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart.) A few years later, the band reconvened to record an outrageously shitty minor-chord defilement of U2’s wide-screen classic “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which is so spiritually and aesthetically fraught I almost can’t believe it left the studio. (Naturally, that cover never got anywhere close to a singles chart.) The point here is that Disturbed might be more in on the joke here than we think, and that surely counts for something.
But that flair for novelty doesn’t alone explain why this cover has managed to stick around for a decade and counting. Both Molanphy and Rutherford are largely mystified by that question, though the latter points to a 2016 performance of the song on Conan that went massively viral—racking up 159 million views on YouTube and a raft of comments in awe of lead singer David Draiman’s golden baritone. (One sample: “You can physically feel the emotion in his voice as he sings each line of this song.”)
Beyond that, who knows? My best guess is that due to the profound heritage of the original—how essential it is to the American songbook—Disturbed’s take has accrued a sense of timelessness that transcends the chintzy, Hot Topic texture of the band itself. (An apt comparison might be Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah,” another song that seems to have levitated in the ether for eternity.) This is an observation informed by a few anecdotes I’ve gathered from friends and colleagues, who, across the board, maintain that the retiree crowd adores this cover. One old college pal, who is engaged to a seasoned dive bartender in Los Angeles, told me that “legions of gruff men get weepy” whenever “The Sound of Silence” hits the jukebox. “Never the Simon & Garfunkel version,” she told me. “Only Disturbed.”
This lines up with a testimonial relayed to me by Slate senior editor Isabelle Kohn. “I was at my boyfriend’s parent’s house. They’re conservative Christians—the kind of people who you’d never, ever expect to know who Disturbed is, let alone listen to them,” said Kohn. “One day, totally unprompted, his dad, who is in his early 60s, turned to us and said, ‘You know what song is really freaking amazing? ‘Sound of Silence’ by Disturbed. Man, that’s such a jam.’ Our jaws dropped.” (Kohn added that when her uncle died at the age of 80, her family eulogized him with the cover. “It was his favorite song,” she said.)
Meanwhile, other geriatrics plaster YouTube with comments like, “I’m 71 years old. I was about 13 or 14 when Paul Simon wrote this song and it’s always been a favorite. When I heard ‘Disturbed’ do this cover, I actually had goosebumps from head to toe. By the time it got to the end, I had tears in my eyes. ‘Disturbed’ has brought a great deal of justice to this great hit, and will carry its legacy for many, many years. Out of the millions of views of this video, I’m sure at least 1,000 are mine.”
I’m glad that the Boomers are discovering the alt-metal superstars of yesteryear, but the pervasiveness of the cover does leave me a little concerned about the commercial ceiling of rock music—let alone hard rock—going forward. Surely it isn’t a good omen that the bench of talent has been cleared out to the point that the single most popular song in the genre was performed by a quartet of men now in their 50s, and written by a man now in his 80s. Maybe the most pressing legacy of Disturbed’s historic run is that we’re all steadily getting older and have permanently lost our grasp on the levers of collective taste. Guitar bands are in the wilderness, and who knows if they’ll ever make it out. Hello darkness, my old friend.