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Addicted is the twelfth studio album by Canadian musician Devin Townsend, and the second album in the Devin Townsend Project series. The album was released on November 17, 2009, on Townsend's independent record label HevyDevy Records. The album was written and produced by Townsend, and features Ryan Van Poederooyen, Brian Waddell, Mark Cimino, and Anneke van Giersbergen. According to Townsend, Addicted is an album of "melodic" and "danceable" music. He compared the album's songwriting to his more accessible songs, such as "Life" from Ocean Machine: Biomech (1997), "Stagnant" from Terria (2001), and "Material" from Physicist (2000). The album's production style was directly influenced by Nickelback's 2008 album Dark Horse. Townsend has quipped that "Some parts of it sound like Meshuggah, some parts of it sound like Boney M."
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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.
Rating: 6/10
Surprisingly cool pop metal with some good melody.
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