As it stands in 2025, the chances of us ever getting a new System Of A Down record look pretty dismal. In 2020, it took a bloody conflict in their Armenian homeland to get the band into the studio and record two tracks. Protect The Land and Genocidal Humanoidz were bittersweet reminders of just why we fell in love with SOAD’s zany, scattershot metal in the first place, and just what a vital voice the band are in a world hellbent on repeatedly scraping itself across the bottom of the barrel.
But another half decade has since passed. Thank God, then, for guitarist Daron Malakian, who’s continued to fill the void by writing bonkers, fury-fuelled bangers for his side-project Scars On Broadway. Given that Daron wrote the lion’s share of SOAD’s output, it’s not surprising that this third album is everything fans have been hankering for.
Opener Killing Spree lurches between about three melodies, each of them as irresistible as the last in a hail of shred, chug and eyewatering lyrics: ‘It’s going to feel like Jesus is coming back! It’s going to feel like a shot of fucking smack…’. Satan Hussein opens with a rousing chant of ‘Quaaludes! Vicodin! Chinese Cups and Echinacea!’.
Either track would have felt at home on any SOAD album. Manic and forcefully earwormy, with a biting political undertow, the latter warns: ‘I’m the neighbourhood watch, a machine gun in my crotch… Thou shall not kill’. The Shame Game opens with the same sense of creeping dread as SOAD’s Aerials, before veering in a more whimsical direction.
On a record that is unmistakably the work of its creator, there are left turns. Done Me Wrong breaks midway into a loopy, Armenian-folk power-keyboard solo. Destroy The Power is like a game of whack-a-mole veering between a Ghost-like choral hymn, prog and nu metal crunch. It is never once boring. In a world where we can’t have System Of A Down, this will more than do nicely.
Addicted To The Violence is out now.
