Dark Before Dawn is the fifth studio album by American rock band Breaking Benjamin, released on June 23, 2015, by Hollywood Records.

Produced and composed by Burnley, the album took shape towards the end of the hiatus and was mostly written before the new lineup "even played a single note together."

Dark Before Dawn was the first album to not feature former guitarist Aaron Fink and bassist Mark James Klepaski.

In early 2010, Benjamin Burnley announced he was too ill to perform, thereby putting the band on indefinite hiatus while he went through the medical system.

[2] After being ordered by a judge to arbitration,[3] the issues were settled, announced in April 2013, as Burnley reserved the exclusive right to continue under the band name Breaking Benjamin.

Burnley stated that after growing frustrated with the lack of answers concerning his health condition, he decided to focus on writing music, saying on That Metal Show, "I literally took my medical records [...] and I slammed them down like, 'You know what, forget this, I'm not getting anywhere with this', so I just decided to stop trying to find out whatever it was and just focus on our music, and that's when Dark Before Dawn really started to take shape."

Sealy from MusicSnake said of the music, "For those who have enjoyed Breaking Benjamin's previous albums, the sound of Dark Before Dawn will be unsettlingly familiar.

As a whole, Dark Before Dawn feels and sounds as if the band has fine-tuned Phobia, some of the instrumentation making the listener pause and consider if they've heard the song on a previous album.

It received a positive review from AllMusic's James Monger, noting that "as thick, smartly-produced, largely inoffensive blasts of generic hard rock go, you could do a lot worse, and longtime fans will appreciate the fact that Burnley and his new shipmates stay true to the band's unwavering allegiance to all things late-'90s/early-2000s post-grunge/hard rock", but also adding that "it's hard to conceal the fact that most of these songs are nearly interchangeable with the band's older material.

"[24] SF Weekly writer Matt Saincome gave the disc a negative review, saying, "The only reprieve on this album comes in the form of track 10, "Ashes of Eden," an acoustic love song that is functional, palatable, and proves that it's the stylistic choices that make the rest of Dark Before Dawn unbearable to anyone with a halfway decent music taste.

"[27] Dark Before Dawn debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, earning 141,000 album-equivalent units in its first week of release.