That keeps us not only a step ahead, but a step ahead of ourselves.” We try to not sound like System Of A Down, let alone anyone else. We want every new song to be done in a way we haven’t done before. “When we write music, we try to do something different than even what we do,” Serj Tankian told me in 1998, just before the release of his band’s debut album. Some tracks were injected with Middle-Eastern and Armenian musical flourishes others were sprinkled with carnivalesque lunacy or melancholy atmospheres. It sounded like an acid-damaged hybrid of hardcore-orientated Slayer, early Faith No More and Dead Kennedys, with multitextured guitars, syncopated drums, nasal melodic vocals and jazzy frills. Their difficult-to-categorise debut was heavy, quirky and dangerously eclectic. System Of A Down were initially lumped in with nu metal, but there was clear water between them and their shiny-tracksuited, baseball-cap-wearing peers.
Nu metal trailblazers such as Korn, Deftones and Limp Bizkit had dispensed with the genre’s flash and shred, replacing it with rapping, turntables and samples. Metallica had chopped off their hair and released the divisive Load and Reload albums. The old guard were in bad shape, with Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford having left Iron Maiden and Judas Priest respectively earlier in the decade, and many other older bands had been taken out of the game by grunge. When System Of A Down was released in June 1998, metal was in a strange place.
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