Last year, a new System of a Down album for 2017 was practically a certainty, with the band revealing they had around 15 tracks considered good enough for their first album in over a decade.
However, after a chat with drummer John Dolmayan in May cast some doubt on the record being released this year, as reported by Metal injection, bassist Shavo Odadjian has spoken on the topic during a live Instagram Q&A, giving fans the answer they most definitely didn’t want to hear.
“I know, I’m waiting for a new album too,” he began. “It’s not happening, I don’t know. I don’t know when it’s gonna be. Not right now.”
A shorter analysis of the situation than the one given by Dolmayan, who went into a bit more depth in his May interview.
“In our band, the difficulty really isn’t, ‘Is one of us gonna fall off the wagon or get into a bad situation?’ It’s really a matter of, ‘Are we gonna come together and make something happen?’ It’s been about twelve years since we’ve put out an album.
“I don’t know why we aren’t coming out with an album. It’s very disheartening, because it seems like we all get along, we all have a great time touring, we still are putting together really good music. I think that we can put out a fantastic album.”
“The funny thing is we all get into the studio, everybody’s getting along great, we have a blast on the road,” he said, making it clear that the only thing stopping the album from happening is a small matter of logistics.
“I know a lot of our American fans are saying, ‘Why don’t you guys tour the States more often?’ We talked about it about two years ago. We said, ‘Look, we haven’t made an album’ — at that point it was a decade only that we hadn’t made an album — only one short decade, ’cause we have so many left… [Laughs] And we talked about it and we said, ‘Look, let’s make our album first.’
“We had every intention of going in the studio and working on an album. As far as the timeline, everybody had their own opinion of when that was gonna happen. For me, it was ten years ago, and then there’s varying degrees of that. If I had my way, we would have put out five albums in the last twelve years.”
For now, we’re left with a bassist and drummer who desperately want to work on a new record, while Serj Tankian is content delivering admittedly awesome Game of Thrones covers.
