New System of a Down Album Scheduled to Arrive On the Same Day as Release of New Necrophagist Album

Will there ever be a new System of a Down album? Yesterday, Vince told me he’s been listening to Mezmerize a lot recently, and I, having not done so myself in some time, subsequently felt inspired to put it on. And it was only then that I realized, holy shit, this album came out in 2005… which means it’s been almost ten years since the last SOAD album (Mezmerize’s sister record, Hypnotize, was released six months after its predecessor). That is a STUPID long time. It didn’t even take Anthrax that long to release Worship Music. It’s a Necrophagistian amount of time. It’s the roughly the same amount of time that passed between the release of “The Spaghetti Incident?!” and the announcement that Guns N’ Roses’ new album would be called Chinese Democracy. It’s a timespan during which Devin Townsend has been involved with 7,834,556 releases and Kevin Talley has played with 100,589,762 bands. It means that there’s a whole generation of metal fans who think of System of a Down primarily as an “old” band. I mean, Vince and I got into metal when were ten. The Vince and Axls of 2014 were still shitting themselves on a regular basis the last time SOAD released a new album.

But there’s always hope that this problem will be remedied soon… right? Uh, maybe, maybe not. Drummer John Dolmayan recently said the following to Loudwire:

“I feel like this band still has a lot of issues, things we just have to work out. I’m not really happy with where the band is right now. I think that it’s been way too long since we’ve made an album and I’ve kind of had enough of the mentality of ‘that’s okay.’ It’s not okay.”

“Issues”? Oy. That’s not good, right? (Unless he means the members of the band owns a lot of copies of the Korn album, Issues. That would still be bad news, albeit a different kind of bad news.)

But Dolmayan ultimately seems to be reasonably optimistic about the band hitting the studio sometime before one of them dies:

“We’re turning into the fucking Eagles now. 15 years are gonna go by before we make a new album. [Laughs] For me, it’s irritating. But I do the best I can to understand that there’s a lot to be worked through in order to make something great and if it isn’t fantastic, there’s no reason for us to do it … It always seems like it’s on the cusp of happening, but there’s also some personal reasons we haven’t started yet. We could have started already, but we chose not to for personal reasons that I’m not at liberty to discuss right now. It’s positive stuff, that’s all I can say at the moment. We could have very easily have been in the studio as you and I are speaking right now, but for something very positive, we couldn’t. Let’s just leave it at that. Let people surmise what that means.”

Funny enough, Dolmayan has now reiterated almost the same information to The Pulse of Radio:

“You know, there’s still some drama from the past that we’ve got to figure out, and the funny thing is that we get onstage, we have a great time. The last couple of tours have probably been the most fun we’ve ever had, but I’m a very honest guy. You know, there’s problems in this band. But they’re problems that can be figured out and we’re in the process of doing that. We probably would have been in the studio making an album already, but for personal reasons, one of our members can’t be in the studio right now. It’s a positive thing, but that’s all I can say on that right now.”

“Problems”? That’s even worse than “issues”!!! Oy yoy yoy!

Dolmayan’s comments about “one of our members” delaying recording also seems to echo the sentiments of bassist Shavo Odadjian, who posted a rant on Facebook last year blaming the lack of new material on vocalist Serj Tankian (who, not coincidentally, has managed to make a very successful solo career for himself)… although the whole “for personal reasons” that are “positive,” thing suggests the situation may be out of the musician in question’s hands. (And what could that be? Having a baby? Rehab? Destroying all the physical and digital copies of Morbid Angel’s last album?)

But I do think System of a Down will get around to making a new album eventually. Like I said, in both interviews, Dolmayan ends on a fairly upbeat note. And besides, every band reunites sooner or later, and these days, it seems, every reunion leads to a new album. If they can’t pull it off under the ten year mark, hopefully they can make it happen before Mezmerize and Hypnotize are fifteen years old.