Addicted

Addicted by Devin Townsend Project is the kind of poppy metal that is just not up my alley. I'm a big fan of Anneke van Giersbergen (certainly in her The Gathering days), but this is just to clean in production. It sounds like one of the most inoffensive metal albums ever. Like a tiger getting it's nails and teeth removed and wearing a pink dress with sunflowers. It's boring and it does not feel right.

I really like the album "City" by Strapping Young Lad, but I've never listened to anything else by Devin Townsend, so I wasn't expecting this to be as poppy as it ended up being. I think I like it. Definitely still prefer the industrial metal sounds of SYL, but it was charming.

I didn't look into this at all before listening and it was a real surprise. Top tier disconnect between cover art and sound. Anyway kinda wierd, coming in straight ahead metal and getting progressively more kind of pop oriented or at least inflected. Lyrically, at a minimum it seemed to avoid that metal hyper-self-seriousness (underlined by the goofy exclamation of the titles) but honestly I couldn't pick up much of the words and where I could they seemed pretty nuts and bolts basic if not worse (was that line "the ocean returns to the sea"?). Oddly lovable despite it all, not at all my thing but this guy seems all right.

June 10, 2026 HL: "Supercrush!", "The Way Home!", "Numbered!" It's CanCon, from VanCity this time! Man after the first track ("Addicted!") I did not have high hopes, thinking it would be another miserable trudge through nu metal territory. But then with the super melodic "Bend It Like Bender!", I realized this isn't the album I thought it was. Anneke van Giersbergen threw me off. I'm not familiar with this Dutch singer's other work, but her presence changes the album quite considerably. Even when Townsend is singing melodically like on "The Way Home!", she comes across so cleanly and earnestly I forget I'm listening to a metal album. I now get that this is an extreme metal artist very self-consciously making a pop album-- in the vein of Dark Horse by Nickelback. Dark Horse?? I had to listen to that interview because, for better or for worse, that damn album is important to me. "Burn It to the Ground", "Gotta Be Somebody", "This Afternoon" , "Never Gonna Be Alone", & "If Today Was Your Last Day" all played on the radio at a frankly disgusting frequency. I don't know how it was in the States. The reason for my soft spot for this one is a little more complicated than "waterboarded by the album singles"; for one, my mom was a big fan of this band (she passed in 2010), but also they were trying something different beyond trying to rewrite "How You Remind Me" yet again! You could say the Mutt Lange-assisted pop production is just avoiding old mistakes by making all new ones, but idk. I think it's their least bad album :) Anyway, back to Townsend. What inspiration could he gleam from Nickelback? Well, in his words: "This record sounds incredible". Agreed, man. Then he goes on to undercut his initial praise: "My God, every song is about this guy's penis". Pretty much, yeah. So basically, he was fascinated by the ultra-commercial sheen of that record, and sought to emulate it his way. Honestly knowing more about his process makes me appreciate this one more. Not listening too closely, one might think this veers pretty close to late 2000s cock rock, even if the parts with extra bombast reminds me of Muse, a favourite band of mine. But taken as a whole, Addicted! is a pretty fun tapdance between pop & heavy metal 3.5/5

No thanks

This was not what I was expecting it to sound like from the short description and the album artwork. I enjoyed this pop-like metal genre a lot!

The first song put me off… sounded like this was going to be some nü metal thing with a lot of screaming… but after that the poppy hard sound appealed to me quite a bit, bordering on the operatic, with high drama more akin to Muse. I like the soaring pop sensibility of this!

Addicted was good, did not know what to expect so to immediately be met with hard rock was a welcome surprise, and it maintains that intensity for the most part, loses its way a bit in the middle by trying to pair it with late-90s eurotrance vocals, but overall a good 3/5 time was had by all.

I don't know, I enjoyed this, but as more of a guilty pleasure than anything. It reminded me of the power metal I liked as a teenager. There were a few songs on here that I liked, but as an album it didn't really pull together for me.

Alternative metal, pop metal, progressive metal. Ni fu ni fa.

Never heard of this artist and went in blind. Not what I expected at all. Liked it, didn’t love it. The opening song was the highlight. Rest was ok to good.

Surprisingly cool pop metal with some good melody.

Rating: 6/10