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Found in the August 18 2001 issue of Kerrang Metal magazine, taken from the first impression of the album 'Toxicity' Kerrang did with Serj and John of SoaD. John: It's about your poisonous content. Your toxicity level. But toxicity doesn't necessarily mean the toxicity of a person, it can be the toxicity of a city. Or the toxicity of a nation. System of a Down (also known abbreviated as SoaD or just simply as System) is an Armenian-American heavy metal band formed in Glendale, California, in 1994.It currently consists of members Serj Tankian (lead vocals, keyboards), Daron Malakian (guitar, vocals), Shavo Odadjian (bass, backing vocals), and John Dolmayan (drums), who replaced original drummer Andy Khachaturian in 1997. Suite-Pee (System Of A Down, 1998) The first track on System Of A Down's self-titled debut was an early benchmark for their schizoid sound, their progressive politics, their unbending conviction. 'Toxicity' is also System Of A Down's second album that carries such singles as Chop Suey, Toxicity, and Aerials. A song made by System Of A Down that's a testament to the disorder, confusion, and complexity of the world. Toxicity definition is - the quality or state of being toxic: such as. How to use toxicity in a sentence.
On September 32001, System Of A Down were due to play a free show in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The band would release their second album Toxicity the next day and wanted to thank the fans in their native city. As more and more people tried to cram into the venue however, tensions began to grow, causing riot squads and mounted police to set up camp at key points.
As Kerrang! reported at the time, employees from SOAD's record label Columbia told members of the press to leave. Like, right now.
Moments later the announcement was made that the show had to be cancelled due to safety fears. The stage was immediately stormed by angry fans and the scene descended into a full-on riot. Towers of amps were toppled into the crowd and people could be seen through swirls of tear gas smashing everything in sight.
It was a fucked-up situation all right, but it did suggest that System were a band poised to explode.
When they released their self-titled debut three years previously, the world didn't quite know what to make of them. Some cast SOAD as a new Rage Against The Machine due to their fiery political elements, more lumped them in with the nu-metal set, but there was always something different about System Of A Down. Something poetic and fiercely intelligent. Something sinuous and unpredictable.
Something… quacky?!
'Sometimes ‘quacky' might be a guitar, sometimes it's Serj's vocals,' guitarist Daron Malakian explained as Kerrang! joined the band for the mixing of Toxicity at Enterprise Studios in Burbank. 'There's a circus-like vibe to this band. A friend of mine was listening to our new music the other day, and he said it reminded him of a Warner Bros cartoon. He wasn't really talking about the themes of the music, but about the funny sound effects: ‘Bik-ting-tah!'…'
They certainly had their cartoonish side, but in other respects Toxicity was a far more serious proposition. Partly inspired by their love/hate relationship with LA, the album also dealt with issues such as addiction (Chop Suey!), mass incarceration (Prison Song) and, uh, group sex (Bounce).
Not that it was always entirely clear what frontman Serj Tankian was warbling about at any given time. 'I don't know what it means, but I know how it makes me feel,' said producer Rick Rubin of the title track. 'It's like a lot of Neil Young songs, where the lyrics don't necessarily make sense, but they give you this feeling of something going on.'
Perhaps the most controversial song on the album was the Malakian-penned ATWA, as it was inspired by infamous cult leader Charles Manson.
'I collect a lot of Charles Manson's stuff and I have all his parole hearings,' the guitarist told us, before going on to explain that the song's title referred to Manson's environmental movement ATWA (an acronym for ‘Air, Trees, Water, Animals'). 'When they only show a few seconds of what Manson is saying on television, like him saying, ‘If I was going to kill, I'd kill everybody', they don't show you what he said for the hour leading up to that statement,' he continued. 'There's a whole other side of Manson that isn't so evil, but is actually very just and very right.'
Musically, Toxicity saw the Armenian-American band build on the lurching unpredictability of the debut, branching off in even more directions. One of the key moments is also the most understated; a hidden track commonly known as Arto as it featured a guest appearance by Arto Tunçboyacıyan, a folk and jazz multi-instrumentalist of Armenian-Turkish descent.
'There's no guitars or anything on that one,' bassist Shavo Odadjian told MTV. 'We used these Armenian instruments and we all chanted. It's really emotional, and my mom cries every time she hears it. I wanted to remember all the Armenians that died in 1915 during the genocide.'
Elsewhere, there were plenty of guitars. 'I've never heard my music sound so good,' Daron enthused during the mixing of the album. 'I personally thought that our first album was not as thick-sounding, as bulky-sounding as I would have liked. So I put down, like, 12 tracks of guitar on every song this time, just to make sure that it's got balls.'
The initial recording sessions had resulted in more than 30 songs, all of which they felt were good enough for an album. The band members voted for which would make the final cut apart from main songwriter Daron, who had to step back from the process. 'I spent too much time with each one of them,' he told us. 'It was too tough for me to choose.'
The rejected songs from the sessions would later end up surfacing on the internet, packaged as Toxicity II. 'These tracks are unfinished and don't reflect the group's high standards of recorded sound,' they said in a statement. 'We are disappointed that our fans are listening to anything less than the best possible recordings from System Of A Down.'
In typically subversive style they reworked and released most of the material on 2002's Steal This Album! – something of a statement in a pre-streaming era when the conversation was all about illegal downloads.
But we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves. The day after the riot in LA, System Of A Down released Toxicity, which was a huge and immediate success. The album, which would go on to sell more than 12 million copies worldwide, shifted 220,000 in its first week and surged to the No. 1 spot in the US Billboard 200. It did this just as the events of 9/11 changed the world forever. Lead single Chop Suey! – originally titled Suicide – was placed on radio operator Clear Channel's list of ‘lyrically questionable' songs and effectively removed from the playlists of more than a thousand US stations.
Their momentum at this point was unstoppable though, and System would go on to be the dominant metal force of the early 2000s.
'We're now in a position where we can tell people to judge us for who we are,' drummer John Dolmayan told us shortly before the album's release. 'We haven't changed our nationalities, we still believe in voicing our opinions, whether it's political or social commentary, or about eating pizza. Everybody wanted us to be Rage Against The Machine when we first came out. We're not.
'It seems like all of our hard work is reaching its fruition,' he concluded, little knowing just how right he would be proven.
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FeaturesFor a brief time there, around the turn of the century, System Of A Down were one of the biggest and arguably the single most important metal band in the world. They might have been lumped in with the nu-metal set, but their politicised, idiosyncratic and frequently barking mad noise sounded like no-one else on the planet. It certainly didn't sound like something built for mainstream consumption, but three of their five studio albums would go on to debut at Number One in the U.S. album charts as the band exploded all around the world.
Although SOAD have toured sporadically over the past decade – and should have been headlining Download this weekend, of course – a much-anticipated and occasionally teased sixth album has never materialised. So that's it. Just five albums, one of which was a platter of leftovers (sort of) and another two of which were essentially different slices of a double album.
It's worth noting that, despite the unconventional genesis of some of the individual entries, there isn't a single duff album in that compact back catalogue. This ranking doesn't go from awful to good, but rather from still-pretty-bloody-good-thank-you-all-the-same to brilliant. Who knows whether we'll ever get that elusive sixth record, but for now here are all System Of A Down's albums ranked from worst to best…
Despite being released six months apart, Mezmerize and Hypnotize were both written and recorded at the same time. Which does beg the question of why Mezmerize hit so much harder than its companion piece. Hypnotize – which currently stands as System Of A Down's last official release – certainly isn't terrible. The buzzsaw energy of Attack makes for a great opener and the emotive closer Soldier Side (‘They were crying when their sons left / God is wearing black') remains one of the band's most underrated moments. In between there are more standout songs, but they're peppered with one too many forgettable tracks and a general slump towards the album's end. And the serving of ‘Banana terracotta terracotta pie' on Vicinity Of Obscenity sounds like a Mighty Boosh outtake in a bad way, proving that even for SOAD there was (or should have been) a limit to the silliness.
Steal This Album! (2002)
This would probably be the choice of many fans over Hypnotize for the band's least-good album, but its ramshackle, disjointed nature – coupled with the manner it came into being – lends it a sense of don't‑give-a-flying-one fun. Back when illegal downloading trumped streaming, a bunch of files appeared on the web under the guise of Toxicity II. The band gathered the material and released it in better quality format under the only-partly-joking title Steal This Album!. Debate still rages about whether the songs were a collection of cast-offs or, as the band have claimed, top-notch tracks that simply didn't fit Toxicity. Serj Tankian has declared it his favourite System album and, while we wouldn't go that far, there's a spontaneous sense of joy to the stuttering verses and chanted chorus of I‑E-A-I-A-I‑O and a genuinely unsettling feel to Mr Jack. It's patchy, certainly, but still well worth revisiting.
System Of A Down Toxicity
Mezmerize (2005)
System Of A Down Toxicity Album
Of the decidedly non-identical twins born in 2005, Mezmerize was the one that got the looks. Lead single B.Y.O.B. was a suitably explosive introduction at the time, proving protest could be sexy as that slinky ‘Everybody's going to the party…' hook snaked around raw, jagged aggression and lyrics skewering the Iraq War. It's remained one of the band's most recognisable anthems, but the likes of Question!, Violent Pornography and Lost In Hollywood are almost as good – if not quite as iconic. Cigaro demonstrates how to do monstered-up Primus wackiness without tipping completely into parody, and there's a sense of controlled chaos and consistency here that isn't always quite so apparent. The only real downside to Mezmerize is that Hypnotize was ever-so-slightly disappointing by comparison.
System Of A Down (1998)
This was System Of A Down's explosive introduction to the world at large; crunching riffs, sinuous shapes, kombucha mushroom people and all. Korn had already given '90s metal a much-needed shot in the arm and 1998 was the year nu-metal went mainstream, but, while there were plenty of uninspired chancers just looking to follow the leaders, SOAD were very much their own beast. Serj Tankian's acrobatic vocals were leagues away from the standard monochrome bark and the same can be said from the ever-shifting patterns, Armenian folk motifs and those cartoonish squalls and flourishes that guitarist Daron Malakian once memorably described to Kerrang! as ‘quacky'. System never sounded quite so raw and heavy as they did on their debut, and songs like Sugar and Suite-Pee would remain all-time greats… but there was still better to come.
Toxicity (2001)
Yes, it's the obvious choice but we're not going to be contrary just for the sake of it. The self-titled debut was heavier and Steal This Album! was quirkier, but Toxicity took everything that was great about System Of A Down and moulded it into a compact, near-perfect beast of an album. Opener Prison Song remains a sharp and focused burst of anger, driven by those crunching riffs and a barrage of statistics; the lyrics more direct and utilitarian than the oblique dadaism of the debut. There's still a streak of dark poetry running through Toxicity though and, unlike LA's other great political dissidents Rage Against The Machine, a surreal sense of humour. There was also a sense that the music could go anywhere, from the anthemic crunch of Chop Suey! to the eerie sway of Aerials and the hidden track Arto, featuring traditional instruments and a guest appearance from folk and jazz multi-instrumentalist Arto Tunçboyacıyan. Nearly 20 years on it still sounds as fresh, exciting and – sadly when it comes to the politics – as relevant as ever.
Catch System Of A Down on Download TV this Sunday (June 14) as part of the virtual festival. Find out more on the Download website.
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The Rage Against The Machine and System Of A Down men have covered Natural's Not In It for an upcoming Andy Gill tribute album…
Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin will be sharing eight covers by Jewish artists for The Hanukkah Sessions! project.
