System Of A Down may not have made a new album in 20 years, but guitarist Daron Malakian hasn’t been idle. As well as sporadically touring with System, he’s reactivated his other band Scars On Broadway, who released their third album, Addicted To Violence, this month.
The brand new issue of Metal Hammer features an epic, career-spanning interview with Daron that covers everything from his early years on the LA club scene to deliberately winding up Slayer’s audience when SOAD supported them in the late 1990s.
In the interview, Daron also addresses the nu metal scene that SOAD were originally lumped in with when they first broke out in the late ’90s.
“We were lucky that there was a scene,” he tells Hammer. “We were able to play, and play in front of audiences that came to see those other bands. But I don’t think anybody sounds like we did. I don’t think we felt like we didn’t belong and I don’t feel like we did belong.
“But there’s so many fucking genres and then there are subgenres of the subgenre, it just gets lost. System Of A Down and Scars, that’s what I do. I don’t look at what other bands are doing and say, ‘Well, I’ve got to do that to fit in with those guys.’ But for some reason we fit into that whole [nu metal] thing. That’s just the time that we existed.”
He goes on to talk about some of System’s peers from the nu metal scene, praising the movement’s originators.
“I’ll say one thing about the original nu metal bands – Deftones, Korn, all the ones that were the first, and add us to that list – they were all doing something unique. We were all the kids that grew up listening to Metallica and Slayer, all that fucking thrash stuff, but we weren’t copying it. We were taking that influence and we were bringing in other things, other influences, and creating something new with that heavy sound. All those copy bands, I don’t give a shit about any of them. The ones that came out and started their own thing and did their own thing, those bands deserve credit.”
In the same interview, Daron talks about the unexpected musical genesis of System Of A Down‘s breakthrough album, 2000’s Toxicity.
“I wrote all of the Toxicity record while I was still living with my parents,” he says. “They would hear me playing my guitar in my room, and when Toxicity came out, they would hear Aerials or Chop Suey! on the radio or MTV and they’d be like, ‘Oh that’s the one we heard you playing in your room all the time!’ So I think they knew more than me.”
Read the full interview with Daron in the brand new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now. Buy it online and have it delivered straight to your door.
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