The story of System of a Down

Armenian kids in Hollywood

Every member of System of a Down is of Armenian descent, and three of the four were born outside the United States. Serj Tankian was born in Beirut, Lebanon, on the twenty first of August 1967. All four of his grandparents had survived the Armenian genocide. When he was seven, with Lebanon sliding into civil war, his family moved to Los Angeles. John Dolmayan was also born in Beirut, in 1972, and his family fled the same war. Shavo Odadjian was born in Yerevan, then part of the Soviet Union, in 1974, and arrived in Los Angeles at the age of five. Only Daron Malakian, born on the eighteenth of July 1975, was a Hollywood native.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Daron's father Vartan was a painter, dancer and choreographer from Mosul in Iraq, and his mother was a sculptor. A relative played him a Kiss record when he was four, and heavy metal took over from there. He really wanted a drum kit, but his parents bought him a guitar, reasoning that you cannot turn drums off. He picked it up at eleven and learned by ear. At home the soundtrack was very different. His mother sang the Egyptian star Umm Kulthum while she was pregnant with him, and Daron later said those Arabic scales simply leak out of his playing, where most American guitarists reach for the blues.[1] [2]

Serj, Daron and Shavo all went through the Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School in Los Angeles, but Serj was eight years older, so they never crossed paths there. Serj studied marketing at California State University, Northridge, and only started playing keyboards and writing songs in his second year. After graduating in 1989 he worked for his uncle in the downtown jewelry district, even building an accounting software company for jewelers. Then, driving home in the rain from a law school prep class, he pulled over and admitted to himself that he did not want to be a lawyer. He wanted to make music.[1] [2]

Serj and Daron finally met around 1992, working on separate projects at the same rehearsal studio. They formed a band called Soil, with Dave Hakopyan on bass and Domingo Laranio on drums. Shavo, a bank worker studying psychology, became their manager. Between wire transfers at the bank he kept phoning the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, begging for a gig, until the booker told him to go and sell seventy five tickets. According to Shavo, they sold a hundred and fifty. Soil played that one show, made one jam session recording, and folded in 1994. Serj later called it the broth in which System of a Down was cooked.[1] [2] [3]

Victims become a System

In 1994 Serj, Daron and Shavo started again. Daron had written a poem called Victims of a Down, and the band nearly took that name. Shavo argued that the word system would appeal to more people, and there was a practical bonus. Filed under S, their records would sit next to their heroes, Slayer. Shavo moved from guitar to bass and handed the managing job to David Benveniste, known as Beno, and his company Velvet Hammer, which still represents Serj today. On drums they brought in Andy Khachaturian, an old school friend of Daron and Shavo who had played with Daron in a teenage band called Snowblind.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Between 1995 and 1997 the band made a string of demo tapes and built a big following in the Los Angeles clubs, playing the Whisky a Go Go and the Viper Room. Their first professionally recorded song appeared in 1997 on Hay Enk, a compilation supporting recognition of the Armenian genocide. Yet record companies kept passing. Daron later said that for two or three years they were selling out clubs and nobody would sign them because they were Armenian. Label people asked who in Germany would ever care. One major label nearly got them, but after seeing the posters on its office walls the band decided it had no idea what to do with rock.[1] [2]

The man who did know was Rick Rubin. His talent scout Guy Oseary tipped him off, and Rubin went to see them at the Viper Room. He later said it was the funniest show he had seen, and that he could not stop laughing because it was so intense. He signed them to American Recordings, distributed by Columbia, and the band celebrated with a show at the Roxy on the twelfth of September 1997. Rubin admitted he thought only a small group of oddballs like himself would ever love them. Nobody, he said, was waiting for an Armenian heavy metal band, so it had to be good enough to rise above that.[1] [2]

There was one more change before the first album. In mid 1997 Andy Khachaturian badly broke his hand, an injury that meant around a year of recovery. The band had already asked their friend John Dolmayan, whose group shared their rehearsal space, to learn the songs just in case. Daron remembered telling Shavo to call John without a second's hesitation. John had been drumming since the age of two, when he copied his saxophonist father's drummer, and he named Keith Moon as his biggest hero. Andy went on to co found the band The Apex Theory with former Soil bassist Dave Hakopyan.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The debut and the road

System of a Down released their first album, simply called System of a Down, on the thirtieth of June 1998. It was cut at Sound City in Van Nuys with Rick Rubin producing and Sylvia Massy engineering. The cover used a 1928 poster by the German artist John Heartfield, made for the Communist Party of Germany, showing an open hand. The record was a whiplash mix of thrash, jazz, punk and Armenian melody. Serj explained that you do not think about only one thing all day. You feel love, then hate, then anger at your boss, and the band wanted all of that inside a single song.[1] [2] [3]

The singles Sugar and Spiders surprised everyone, the band included, by becoming MTV staples. Sugar is a frantic, jazz splattered song about society's addiction to substances and to sensational news, while Spiders is slow and haunting, and it turned up on the soundtrack of Scream 3. The band toured relentlessly. They opened for Slayer, played the second stage at Ozzfest, went out with Fear Factory and Incubus, and headlined the Sno Core tour with Mr. Bungle in support. Serj later said his talks with Mike Patton on that tour were some of the most interesting conversations of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Late in 1998 the band even landed on Chef Aid, the South Park album, playing a song called Will They Die 4 You. One line Serj shouts near the end would later be recycled into a song called Boom. The debut was certified gold in February 2000. It had been a slow burn, taking about three years to sell a million copies in America. It eventually went double platinum, and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die would later include it. But what came next would make the first record look like a warm up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Toxicity and a riot in Hollywood

In March 2001 the band went back in with Rick Rubin at Cello Studios in Hollywood and stayed for about four months. They arrived with dozens of songs, around forty by most accounts, and recorded more than thirty. Daron went wild on guitars. On the debut there were two guitar tracks per song. On this record, he said, there were twelve. The sessions were intense. Daron and John got into a fight so violent that Daron hit John with a microphone stand. They drove each other to hospital, got stitched up side by side, and sat there laughing that it was one of the coolest moments in the band's history.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Out of that chaos came the songs. Shavo brought in a piece he called Version 7.0, a nod to the AOL software of the day, and it became the title track. John found its beat while mocking Shavo, who would not stop talking in front of him. Daron wrote Chop Suey on an acoustic guitar in the back of the band's RV on the highway, before they could afford a tour bus. When Serj was stuck for words for its bridge, Rick Rubin handed him books from his own shelves, and the biblical middle section came out of that. The album closed with a hidden track, Arto, built around the Armenian duduk with no guitars at all.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On Labor Day, the third of September 2001, the band planned a free thank you concert in a Hollywood parking lot meant for a few thousand people. Around ten thousand turned up, and the show was called off minutes before the band went on, with no announcement. After more than an hour of waiting, security took down the band's banner, and the crowd stormed the stage. Fans smashed or stole about thirty thousand dollars of gear, threw bottles and rocks at police and knocked over portable toilets. Six people were arrested. The band said all of it could have been avoided if they had simply been allowed to go on stage and explain.[1] [2] [3]

Toxicity came out the next day, the fourth of September 2001. A week later came the September eleventh attacks, and that same week the album sat at number one in America, having sold around two hundred and twenty thousand copies in its first week. Clear Channel put Chop Suey on its list of songs radio stations were advised to avoid, because of a line about suicide. Serj also published an essay warning that bombing Afghanistan would kill civilians and create more martyrs, which angered many people at the time. Still, the album hit a million sales in six weeks, and Spin named it the album of the year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Assault, leaks and protest

Straight after the release the band toured with Slipknot. At the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in October 2001, Shavo tried to get backstage and, by his account, security guards racially profiled him, beat him and dragged him out. Slipknot had ordered the area closed because of their pyrotechnics. Shavo needed medical treatment and later sued the security firm. The tour carried on, and the two bands co headlined the Pledge of Allegiance tour with Rammstein. Meanwhile Aerials became the band's first number one, topping both the rock and alternative charts in 2002. Offered a chance to play it at the Grammys, they said no.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Toxicity had left more than a dozen strong songs on the shelf, and in 2002 rough versions leaked online under the fan name Toxicity II. The band said fans were hearing unfinished work, re recorded the tracks, and released them on the twenty sixth of November 2002 as Steal This Album, a nod to Abbie Hoffman's book Steal This Book. The disc looked like a homemade CD R marked with a felt tip pen, and about fifty thousand special copies carried artwork designed by individual members. It peaked at number fifteen. Years later both John and Serj named it their favorite System of a Down record.[1] [2] [3]

As America moved toward war with Iraq, the band made their politics loud. For the song Boom they asked the filmmaker Michael Moore to direct a video built from footage of anti war marches around the world, including the protests of the fifteenth of February 2003. It showed cartoon versions of George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden riding rockets, and MTV Europe banned it soon after release. Daron said the war was personal, because he had family living in Iraq and had visited as a teenager. He described the people he met there as ordinary folk who did not want war with anyone.[1] [2] [3]

Serj was building a parallel life as an activist. In 2002 he and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine founded Axis of Justice, a network linking music fans with grassroots causes. Morello said the spark was seeing Ozzfest fans that summer with Nazi and Ku Klux Klan tattoos. Axis of Justice tents followed the two musicians' bands to festivals, and a radio show ran on the Los Angeles station KPFK. In 2003 Serj also launched his own label, Serjical Strike, whose first release was Serart, a collaboration with the Armenian folk musician Arto Tunçboyacıyan.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mezmerize, Hypnotize and a shift in power

In 2004 the band recorded a double album at a Laurel Canyon house known as The Mansion and decided to release it in two halves, six months apart. Daron's father Vartan painted the covers, designed so the two pieces joined up. Mezmerize arrived on the seventeenth of May 2005 and debuted at number one in the United States with about four hundred and fifty three thousand copies sold in its first week. Its lead single B.Y.O.B., a furious attack on the Iraq war and on who gets sent to fight it, became their only American top forty hit, reaching number twenty seven, and won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hypnotize followed on the twenty second of November 2005 and also debuted at number one, selling about three hundred and twenty thousand copies in its first American week. That made System of a Down only the fourth act, after the Beatles, Tupac and DMX, to have two studio albums debut at number one in the same year. The title track reached number one on the modern rock chart, and its video was filmed at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, the same building where Shavo had been beaten four years earlier. Lonely Day, sung by Daron, earned a Grammy nomination but lost to Wolfmother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the triumph, the balance of the band had changed. On the earlier albums Serj wrote most of the words. On these two, Daron wrote nearly all the music and much of the lyrics, and sang lead far more often, sometimes leaving Serj on keyboards and backing vocals. Years later Serj wrote that he had wanted to leave before these albums. He said that by then Daron controlled the creative process and took the lion's share of the publishing money, and that songs he wanted to bring in were shut out. He admitted he did not feel close to the music on those records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Screamers, hiatus and going solo

In 2006 the band starred in Screamers, a documentary by Carla Garapedian about why genocides keep happening, with the Armenian genocide at its center. Serj interviewed his grandfather Stepan Haytayan, a survivor then in his nineties, and Serj and John lobbied the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, for American recognition of the genocide. The film won the audience award for best documentary at the AFI festival. One of the people interviewed, the Turkish Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, was murdered in Istanbul by a Turkish nationalist shortly after the premiere.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 2006 the band announced a hiatus. They headlined Ozzfest that summer, with Shavo's own abstract paintings projected behind them, and played their last show for years on the thirteenth of August 2006 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Daron told the crowd they would be back but did not know when. The official line was a well earned rest. Years later Serj took the blame himself, writing that he alone was responsible for the hiatus and that everyone else had wanted to keep touring and recording. John later said the break was a disastrous move for a band that had never reached its peak.[1] [2] [3]

Serj released his first solo album, Elect the Dead, in October 2007. He played almost everything himself, had a different director make a video for every song, and toured with a backing band he gave a deliberately rude name. The album entered the American chart at number four. Daron formed Scars on Broadway with John on drums, and their 2008 album produced the hit They Say. Then, just before the tour, Daron cancelled every date, saying his heart was not in touring, and vanished from public view for about a year. In 2009 the rest of Scars on Broadway went to entertain American troops in Iraq without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Shavo teamed up with the Wu Tang Clan founder RZA on a heavy hip hop project called AcHoZeN, and the two helped score the Vin Diesel film Babylon A.D. with Hans Zimmer. John opened Torpedo Comics, played two shows with a band called Indicator, and even auditioned for the Smashing Pumpkins. Near the end of 2009 three of the four finally shared a stage again. At Shavo's Halloween party at the Roxy, Daron, Shavo and John played together, and weeks later they performed at a benefit for Deftones bassist Chi Cheng, who was in a coma after a car crash, with Chino Moreno singing.[1] [2] [3]

Reunion without a record

On the twenty ninth of November 2010 the band confirmed a reunion for European festivals the next summer. The comeback began in Edmonton, Canada, on the tenth of May 2011 and took in Download in England, Rock am Ring in Germany and their first tour of Latin America. That August the Prime Minister of Armenia gave Serj a commemorative medal for his work on genocide recognition. There was a family twist too. In 2012 Serj married Angela Madatyan, whose sister Diana is John's wife, so the singer and the drummer became brothers in law.[1] [2] [3]

In 2015, the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the band toured Europe under the name Wake Up the Souls. It ended in Yerevan's Republic Square with their first ever concert in Armenia, a free show of about two and a half hours and thirty seven songs. Serj said the aim was bigger than one people. He wanted recognition of the first genocide of the twentieth century to show that humanity could stop killing itself. The band's live shows remained huge, from a sold out Hollywood Bowl in 2013 to festival headline slots across Europe.[1] [2] [3]

What they could not do was make an album. John said in 2016 they were working on more than a dozen songs, but by 2017 Shavo admitted it was not happening. In 2018 Daron told Kerrang that one member wanted an album made his own way and blamed Serj directly. Serj answered with a long public essay. He said he had proposed equal creative input, an equal split of publishing money, and a rule that whoever wrote a song got the final word, and that they could not agree. John blamed all four of them, saying it takes four people to make the band and four to unmake it.[1] [2]

The members kept busy apart. Serj scored films and television, and in 2017 he surprised a Game of Thrones concert in Los Angeles by singing The Rains of Castamere, a version later used on the show's final season soundtrack. That same year he joined Prophets of Rage on stage to sing Like a Stone for his late friend Chris Cornell. In October 2017, at the Hollywood Bowl tribute to Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington, Daron and Shavo played Rebellion, a song Daron had guested on. In 2018 Daron released Dictator, the long delayed second Scars on Broadway album, without John.[1] [2] [3]

Artsakh, arguments and stadiums

In late September 2020 war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenian forces over Nagorno Karabakh, the region Armenians call Artsakh. John felt sick watching it and thought of what his ancestors had faced. At ten o'clock on a Sunday night in early October he texted the other three, asking them to put everything aside and make music for their people. Daron offered Protect the Land, a song written for Scars on Broadway. Serj flew in from New Zealand, and within about a week they had recorded it and the faster, heavier Genocidal Humanoidz. Released in early November 2020, they were the band's first new songs in fifteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The two singles raised more than six hundred thousand dollars for the Armenia Fund, and Serj separately donated two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The war also exposed a deep political split. That June, after the protests over the killing of George Floyd, John had praised Donald Trump online as the greatest friend to minorities, just days after Serj had urged protesters to force Trump's government out. Serj called it frustrating to be on opposite sides from his brother in law, though he said they were united on Armenian issues. Daron still called the singles a one off rather than a new beginning.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The frustration kept spilling out. Serj released songs he had meant for the band as his own Elasticity EP in 2021. In January 2023 John said on a podcast that Serj had not wanted to be in a band for a long time and that they probably should have split in 2006, adding that the others had wasted fifteen or twenty years waiting. In his 2024 memoir, Down with the System, Serj revealed he had once told the band to find a new singer because of a back injury and his dislike of touring. They secretly auditioned someone, then dropped the idea because the candidate could not scream.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Live, though, the band has only grown. They co headlined the first Sick New World festival in Las Vegas in 2023 and returned in 2024, and that August they and Deftones played the first ever ticketed concert in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. For 2025 they announced a Wake Up stadium tour, with shows at MetLife Stadium, Soldier Field and in Toronto, plus their first South American dates since 2015. In February 2025 Daron said a new album might no longer continue the story for him. As of 2026, they have still released only five studio albums.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The weirdest band to fill arenas

System of a Down sold more than twelve million records worldwide, and three of their five albums debuted at number one in America. Loudwire called them probably the weirdest act ever to sell out arenas, and ranked them among the greatest metal bands of all time. Daron once summed up their sound as if Slayer and the Beatles had had a baby. They folded thrash, punk, jazz, Armenian folk and Middle Eastern scales into songs that could flip from a whisper to a scream in a bar, and they wrote about prisons, war, drugs and genocide alongside pure absurdist nonsense.[1] [2] [3]

Their fans turn up in unlikely places. Morrissey said Lonely Day was the last song he had absolutely loved. RZA picked Mezmerize as one of his favorite rock albums. In 2022 Sweden's prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, told a national rock radio station that when it came to rock, her pick was System of a Down. Chop Suey became their signature song, and in November 2020 its video passed one billion views on YouTube. In 2023 the rapper Lil Uzi Vert covered it, and Serj called covers the biggest compliment a songwriter can get.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Above all, the band turned an obscure grievance into a mainstream cause. For millions of young metal fans, System of a Down were the first to tell them about the Armenian genocide, through songs, the film Screamers, and marches outside the Turkish embassy in Washington. Kerrang later listed ten bands it said would not exist without them, from Avenged Sevenfold to Tesseract. And for a band that has not released an album since 2005, they still draw stadium crowds, a rare case of a catalogue doing all the talking.[1] [2] [3]

The people around System of a Down

Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian. They attended the same Armenian school years apart and met in a shared rehearsal studio in the early nineties. For the first albums Serj wrote most of the words and the two shared the music. By Mezmerize and Hypnotize Daron dominated writing and singing, and Serj later said he wanted equal input and publishing. Their disagreement over how to make a new record has kept the band in the studio stalemate ever since, though both insist they remain friends.[1] [2] [3]

Serj Tankian and John Dolmayan. Both were born in Beirut to Armenian families who fled the Lebanese civil war. In 2012 Serj married Angela Madatyan, sister of John's wife Diana, making them brothers in law. They lobbied Congress together over genocide recognition. Politically they are far apart, with John a vocal Trump supporter and Serj a Bernie Sanders backer, and in 2023 John said Serj had not wanted to be in a band for years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Daron Malakian and John Dolmayan. During the Toxicity sessions they fought so hard that both ended up in hospital, laughing as they were stitched up next to each other. After the 2006 hiatus John followed Daron into Scars on Broadway, drumming on the 2008 album, only for Daron to cancel the tour. When Daron revived Scars on Broadway in 2018, John was no longer part of it.[1] [2] [3]

System of a Down and Rick Rubin. Rubin saw them at the Viper Room, laughed through the whole show and signed them to American Recordings in 1997 when other labels passed. He produced all five albums, with Daron co producing from the second onward. Rubin admitted he often did not know what their lyrics meant but loved how they made him feel. The 2020 singles were the first without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Serj Tankian and Tom Morello. The singer and the Rage Against the Machine guitarist co founded Axis of Justice in 2002 after Morello was shocked by racist tattoos among Ozzfest crowds. They ran festival tents and a radio show together and staged benefit concerts. In 2017 Serj joined Morello's Prophets of Rage on stage to honor Chris Cornell, and Morello later played on John Dolmayan's covers album.[1] [2] [3]

Shavo Odadjian and RZA. The bassist and the Wu Tang Clan founder became close during the hiatus, forming the heavy hip hop project AcHoZeN in 2006 and working with Hans Zimmer on the score for Babylon A.D. System had already covered a Wu Tang Clan song, Shame, on a Hypnotize era single, and RZA later named Mezmerize one of his favorite rock albums.[1] [2] [3]

System of a Down and David Benveniste. Known as Beno, he took over management from Shavo in the band's earliest days through his company Velvet Hammer, which still represents Serj. After the 2001 Hollywood riot he said it could have been avoided if the band had been allowed to play or speak. Years later he co created the Sick New World festival, where System of a Down headlined.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Serj Tankian and Arto Tunçboyacıyan. The Armenian folk musician from Turkey played on Toxicity, including its hidden hymn based closing track, and sang on Bubbles from Steal This Album. In 2003 he and Serj released Serart, the first album on Serj's Serjical Strike label, named by combining the start of each man's name. A second album was planned but never made.[1] [2] [3]

Daron Malakian and Vartan Malakian. Daron's father is a painter, dancer and choreographer from Mosul in Iraq. His artwork became the joined up covers of Mezmerize and Hypnotize and the singles around them. The family's Iraqi ties made the 2003 war personal for Daron, who said he still had relatives living there when the band made the Boom video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Andy Khachaturian and System of a Down. A school friend of Daron and Shavo who had played with Daron in the teen band Snowblind, Andy drummed on all the early demo tapes from 1994 to 1997. A hand injury forced him out just before the debut album. He then fronted The Apex Theory with former Soil bassist Dave Hakopyan, and later worked as a producer and DJ under the name Ontronik.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about System of a Down

• As a teenager, Shavo Odadjian ended up standing right next to Arnold Schwarzenegger in AC/DC's 1993 video for Big Gun. He was just an extra in the crowd, but the lights hit him more than anyone else, so he appears beside Schwarzenegger. Shavo said he was suddenly popular at school the next day.[1] [2]
• Shavo Odadjian has a cameo in the film Zoolander as a member of Hansel's posse. Beyond music, Shavo has directed most of the band's videos and is responsible for their stage design and lighting. He is also a painter whose abstract work filled the screens behind the band at Ozzfest 2006.[1]
• Serj Tankian once ran a successful company selling accounting software designed for jewelers. He built it after helping his uncle's jewelry business, hoping it would fund his music. It worked too well and ate all his time, so he sold the company to focus on songs.[1]
• Daron Malakian wanted to be a drummer, but his parents bought him a guitar because drums cannot be turned down. He picked up the guitar at eleven and taught himself by ear for the first year and a half. By sixteen or seventeen he realized it was above all a songwriting tool.[1]
• In 2006 Daron Malakian said he had not had a drink of alcohol since he was twenty one. He added in the same interview that he smoked a huge amount of cannabis instead. He is also a lifelong ice hockey fan who has held Los Angeles Kings season tickets since 1999.[1]
• The Steal This Album song I E A I A I O was inspired by John Dolmayan meeting David Hasselhoff in a liquor store. John was about twelve when the Knight Rider star, buying a soda, pointed at him cowboy style. John told Serj the story, and it ended up woven into the song's lyrics.[1] [2]
• The sunflower seed imagery in the song Toxicity comes from a very Armenian snacking habit. Daron explained that his family, like many Armenians, eats roasted sunflower seeds as a pastime. In the Toxicity video the band are shown eating seeds, echoing Serj eating chop suey in the Chop Suey video.[1] [2]
• The song Toxicity began life as Version 7.0, a title Shavo Odadjian took from the AOL software of the time. Shavo brought the idea in, but it nearly got lost among dozens of songs until Daron revisited it. John found the beat while mockingly copying Shavo's hand gestures.[1]
• Daron Malakian wrote Chop Suey on an acoustic guitar in the back of an RV, before the band had a tour bus. He said he almost never writes on the road, but this one came to him on the highway between gigs. He thought it was good but never imagined it would become their signature song.[1]
• Bounce, a Toxicity song about group sex, ended up in the family animated film The Secret Life of Pets. Universal used it in the film and on the soundtrack, apparently without looking too closely at what it was about. In the scene, a poodle headbangs along to it.[1]
• Metallica's Lars Ulrich voted Toxicity the second best album of the whole 2000s. In a Rolling Stone poll, Ulrich put Toxicity second and Mezmerize sixteenth. Kirk Hammett put Mezmerize second, and he joined the band on stage to play Aerials in November 2003.[1]
• The band turned down an invitation to perform Aerials at the 2003 Grammy Awards. Aerials was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance. Daron explained at the time that performing at the Grammys was something pop stars did, not System of a Down.[1] [2]
• The debut album took about three years to sell a million copies in America, while Toxicity did it in six weeks. Daron told his old high school newspaper that selling millions did not make them sellouts, because he could not control how many records people bought.[1]
• Old School Hollywood was inspired by a charity celebrity baseball game Daron played in with Tony Danza and Frankie Avalon. The Mezmerize song describes the strange experience of being out of place among old Hollywood celebrities, and it names both men directly.[1] [2]
• A throwaway disco line in Violent Pornography is really just Daron admitting he loves disco. Daron told Revolver that the line has nothing to do with the rest of the song. He has been a huge disco fan all his life.[1]
• John Dolmayan once had his drum kit illustrated by famous comic book artists. He commissioned Arthur Adams, Simon Bisley and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co creator Kevin Eastman, among others. A lifelong collector, he later opened the Torpedo Comics shop in Las Vegas.[1]
• John Dolmayan recorded drums for Killing Joke's 2003 album, but the band used Dave Grohl's takes instead. He also drummed on the debut of Scum of the Earth, on Axis of Justice concerts and on Serj Tankian's first solo album.[1]
• In 2009 John Dolmayan auditioned for the Smashing Pumpkins. It was during the System hiatus, when Jimmy Chamberlin had left the Pumpkins. The same year he formed Indicator, whose second and final show took place at a Las Vegas strip club.[1]
• The word humanoids in Genocidal Humanoidz came from the wrestling manager Bobby The Brain Heenan. Daron said Heenan used to insult wrestling audiences by calling them a bunch of humanoids, and the phrase stuck with him when writing the song.[1]
• Serj Tankian's version of The Rains of Castamere appears on the soundtrack of Game of Thrones' final season. He first sang it as a surprise guest at the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience in Los Angeles in March 2017.[1]
• Morrissey said in 2012 that Lonely Day was the last song he had absolutely loved. Lonely Day, written and sung by Daron, was the last System single before the hiatus and earned a Grammy nomination, losing to Wolfmother's Woman.[1] [2]
• Sweden's prime minister Magdalena Andersson named System of a Down as her favorite rock band on national radio. In February 2022, on the Swedish station Bandit Rock, she called the band really awesome and said they get played at home whenever there is a party.[1] [2]
• On the South Park album Chef Aid, the band recorded a song whose closing line was later reused in Boom. The 1998 track was called Will They Die 4 You. Unlike most acts on the album, the band is never introduced by the character Chef.[1]
• The promo discs of Serj's first solo album were labeled Smart Talk to hide who made it. The code name was meant to stop leaks of Elect the Dead in 2007. A music video was made for every song, each by a different director given total freedom.[1] [2]
• The Hypnotize video was filmed at the same Michigan arena where Shavo Odadjian had been beaten by security in 2001. The Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids was the scene of the 2001 assault. Four years later, in September 2005, the band shot most of the Hypnotize video there.[1] [2] [3]
• Aerials was played at the funeral of Keith Flint, the frontman of the Prodigy. It was System of a Down's first number one hit, topping both Billboard's alternative and mainstream rock charts. Daron also played sitar on the Toxicity recording.[1] [2]
• In 2024 System of a Down and Deftones played the first ever ticketed concert at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The show used a stage left standing after the Outside Lands festival. At the time Serj said touring was no longer a top priority in his life.[1]
• Daron Malakian's own record label released an album by the Norwegian black metal band Satyricon. Daron never hid his love of black metal. His imprint EatUrMusic put out Satyricon's 2004 album Volcano, and its first signing was the band Amen.[1] [2]
• John Dolmayan's real first name is Hovig, the Armenian form of John, chosen in honor of his grandfather. He started drumming at two, copying the drummer in his saxophonist father's band, and learned by playing along to records for hours a day.[1]
• Shavo Odadjian's trap band North Kingsley is named after the first street he lived on in Los Angeles. He moved there from Yerevan in 1979. The band, formed in 2019, released its debut single in August 2020.[1]
• Shavo Odadjian directed the TV spot and launch trailer for the video game Mortal Kombat X, set to Chop Suey. He has also directed videos for other bands, including Bad Brains and Taproot, and says his style owes a debt to Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling.[1]
• The Question video came to Shavo Odadjian in a nightmare, and he first pitched it anonymously. He dreamed of a boy offering a girl poisonous berries. Not wanting special treatment as a band member, he submitted the idea without his name, then co directed it in the old Los Angeles Theatre.[1]
• The band chose Question as the second Mezmerize single after discovering that radio stations were already playing it. It followed B.Y.O.B. in 2005. The song and its dreamlike video later won the band an MTV Woodie award in 2006.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.