Our first record, though recoded in a studio, had a very live sound as Rick Rubin loved our sound at shows. We had just spent a couple of years doing heavy touring for our first record while building a following, so we were excited about settling down and writing another record. What was System of a Down’s mindset when it was time to start writing songs for Toxicity? We spoke to Serj Tankian via email to find out about the making of Toxicity, as well as the band’s current tour and whispers about a new record, which would be their first in a decade. ![]() SPIN named it 2001’s album of the year, and it’s widely considered to be the rare popular metal album of the era to stand the test of time.Īlso Read System of a Down’s Serj Tankian and John Dolmayan Join Street Band to Perform ‘Aerials’ in Mexico But its melodic sensibility was the most shocking thing about it, with Malakian harmonizing on several songs and traditional Armenian instrumentation brought in on a few tracks. ![]() With Rick Rubin overseeing its concrete-brick production, the album featuredprotest music (“Prison Song” has so many words squeezed into it that some of the lyrics areyelled, college-campus style), bizarre sketches (the pogo-stick uh, tribute “Bounce”), and even some pretty ballads (“ATWA,” a Charles Manson reference that raised eyebrows). ![]() While their unpredictable and darkly dadaist nature won them immense popularity among alt-metal fans, no one predicted that System of a Down’s next album, 2001’s Toxicity, would be a huge critical and commercial success yielding three unlikely hit singles in the harmonized whiplash of “Chop Suey!,” the jangly-versed “Toxicity,” and the hypnotic dirge “Aerials.” Unfortunately, this success would be forever tied to the week of September 11, the week the album went to number one. It sounded nothing like Korn, Slipknot, or many of the other acts that matched their volume or seven-string impact at the time except for maybe Faith No More there were few precedents for this brand of try-anything metal. System of a Down already stood out drastically from the so-called nü-metal pack on their self-titled debut album in 1998, with their lopsided name and bizarre single, “Sugar,” which loosed bizarro singer Serj Tankian on free jazz verses between crunching refrains, while the rest of the album toyed withoom-pah circus music (“Peephole”) and thrashabilly (“DDevil”).
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