Disturbed frontman David Draiman interrupted riffs and pyro with a rare detour into sincerity last week. He proposed to his girlfriend Sarah Uli live on stage in Sacramento.
Midway through their set at the Golden 1 Center on May 9, Draiman brought Uli out in front of the crowd, grinning as she clocked something was up. “She’s looking at me and she’s wondering, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’” he joked, before switching gears entirely.
“Sarah, my love. You have made my life so much better. You are the light in the darkness for me,” he said, dropping to one knee and pulling out a ring. “It would be the absolute pinnacle of my life and my existence… will you marry me?”
She said yes. And, as is to be expected, the crowd absolutely lost it. Cue hugging, kissing, and thousands of metalheads cheering like they’d just seen someone stage-dive into a double rainbow.
It’s a softer move than you might expect from the guy behind Down with the Sickness, but it tracks. Draiman’s been openly working through a rough few years, publicly sharing his struggles with depression following his divorce from Lena Yada in 2023. He and Yada, who share a son, were together for over a decade. Draiman went public with his relationship with Uli in early 2024.
Disturbed are currently on a massive North American run, celebrating 25 years of The Sickness — the album that launched a thousand gym playlists and firmly cemented them as nü-metal’s snarling, oddly operatic core. UK and European dates follow in September, with Megadeth in tow.
The band also dropped a new track, I Will Not Break, earlier this year, and claim to have a bunch of material banked for their next full-length.
But for now? One knee, one ring, and a rare onstage moment that didn’t involve breakdowns — emotional or otherwise.
MORE IN Music
