Serj Tankian says he’s still willing to quit System of a Down.
He told Guitar World, “I don’t think you could have System without any of us. I’ve always said I don’t want to be in that band with other people, because there’s this uniqueness to what we do. Okay, if someone can’t make a show and we get a sub in, then maybe… but that’s a unique circumstance.”
“I wouldn’t want to be in a band with anyone else other than Daron, Shavo Odadjian and John Dolmayan. There’s a specialness about what happens when we play together – it can only come from the four of us. System would never be the same with anyone else.”
“That being said, I didn’t want to constrain the others and their ability to make a livelihood doing what they love. So I opened the door to the possibility of them being able to work without me, and that’s always been on the table.”
“They might want to tour a lot and I might not, or they might want to make a record that I don’t want to make. I don’t want to stand in their way. But I do hope that one day we can all see eye-to-eye and just do something for the hell of it. Whether it gets released or not is secondary.”
It was brought up to Serj by Guitar World that Tool have had issues with Maynard James Keenan when it comes to recording new music, as they work at different paces. Tankian brought up that System of a Down were working on new music in 2015.
“Yeah, it’s almost like you can’t get over that. But one of my new songs, ‘Justice Will Shine On’, and another song Daron had written about the Armenian tragedy, were actually from 2015. We were considering releasing them back then, but there was a level of constraint or self-restriction.”
“Like, ‘Is this what we should be releasing now? Is this the first thing people should hear?’ But I’m not into that kind of thinking. I’m still the same musician I was in the early ’90s. I want to explore and create something new. If we think it’s good enough, then screw everyone else!”
During a recent interview with Loudwire Nights, System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian stated that he’s open to the idea of recording new music with the band.
It has been almost two decades since System of A Down released a full-length album. The bassist thinks it’s a shame that the band doesn’t make any music now.
“It’s a shame that new music from the band is not happening, because we can do so much,” he explained.
“Look, we went in, we did two songs four years ago. How they sound, man. I mean, that could be an album of that stuff. And we can even write crazier songs. That was quick. Daron brought a few of those in — boom, boom, boom — and the song was done; it was, like, two days.”
The last albums they put out were ‘Hypnotize’ and ‘Mezmerize,’ both released in 2005. Following that, they went on a hiatus until 2011, when they got back together for some European festivals. They have toured occasionally since then, but in terms of new music, they have only dropped two singles.
“We haven’t been making new music,” Tankian said in a different interview. “We only put out two songs when the invasion of Artsakh, Nagorno Karabakh happened in 2020 by Azerbaijan, because we felt like the Azeri trolls, the government-sponsored trolls were taking over social media and the news networks, and the victims weren’t getting the word out. So we became kind of obsessed with getting the word out, because we were seeing our people suffer. So we put out those two songs because of that and we donated a lot of the proceeds for that to the cause as well.”
