System of a Down’s Serj Tankian Will Release A New EP This Fall

Morten Jensen, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Published on:

While the possibility of live System of a Down shows hangs in the balance, the band’s members are all busying themselves with other projects. Earlier this month, bassist Shavo Odadjian dropped a new track with his rap-rock act North Kingsley. Now, frontman Serj Tankian has announced that he’ll be releasing a new EP this fall.

According to Blabbermouth, the EP will be called Elasticity, and will apparently have a heavy synth pressence.

“As far as the EP, these were primarily songs that I wanted to do with System,” said Tankian in an interview with Grammy.com. “When we weren’t able to see eye to eye I just went ahead and finished them. They have more synth flavors than most System songs do, more arpeggiated stuff like that, but they still have the heavy groove and also a lot of beautiful ballady stuff that is more like Elect The Dead and some of my earlier solo stuff. It’s a really good EP.”

He also told SPIN, “I’ve got a lot of other stuff in the pipeline. I’ve got an EP of rock songs that’s gonna be out this year. Once I score another film I’ll probably put out some more soundtracks next year as well.”

Whatever it sounds like, one might expect Tankian’s new EP to be a frustrated one. When asked what bothers him most about what’s going on in the world right now by SPIN, the singer had plenty to comment on.

“The U.S. form of corruption is more refined,” he told SPIN. “It’s legalized. Super delegates; the electoral college, these are all instruments by which the powerful can keep their power and influence a leadership for generations to come with billions of dollars being traded. Right now over the last 15, 20 years, the government of Turkey has spent 40, 50 million dollars on K Street lobbying firms that have lobbied Congress not to recognize the genocide. And luckily the U.S. Congress recognized the genocide in November of 2019, which was a huge victory for justice and the Armenian-American community and the truthful side of history. So yeah the U.S. is very fucking corrupt, on the top. Not on the bottom. Your average person is not dealing with that type of corruption. But on the top, we’re talking billions of dollars for running for president.

“So we need a peaceful revolution like the one in Armenia in the U.S. to topple this type of stupidity. And I say stupidity because it comes from ignorance, from the lack of education. During the Reagan time, they started cutting funding for public education and we’ve created a dumber population in the U.S. than we had previous to that. And that is dangerous because we’re getting dumb fucking leaders because of it.”

***

Words by Chris Krovatin