System Of A Down‘s Serj Tankian has announced a new album titled ‘Covers, Collaborations & Collages’. Find all the details below.
Due for release on October 24, the record will consist of previously unreleased cover songs, collaborations, and other tracks. You can pre-order/pre-save it here.
“Similar to [my 2024 EP] ‘Foundations’, these are pre-existing archival recordings, some of them from way back,” Tankian said in a press release.
“I wanted to put out a record of collaborations I haven’t released before, along with covers, which I haven’t done. The rest, the collages, are parts that fit the puzzle in the same tone, the same vibe.”
Collaborations featured on the album come from Deadmau5, Bic Runga and Lucas Vidal, while Tankian covers tracks such as Chris de Burgh’s ‘I’m Counting on You’ and Armenian songwriter Ruben Hakhverdyan’s ‘When Death Arrives’.
Ahead of the record’s release, Tankian will share one new song a week, along with a video telling the story behind the track. So far, he’s shared the single ‘Electric Dreams’. Check it out, and his explainer, below.
The ‘Covers, Collaborations & Collages’ tracklist is:
01. ‘Electric Dreams’
02. ‘A Seed’ (feat. Deadmau5)
03. ‘I’m Counting on You’ (cover of Chris de Burgh song)
04. ‘I’m in Heaven’
05. ‘Things Unspoken’ (feat. Bic Runga)
06. ‘I Found You’
07. ‘Kneeling Away From the Sun’
08. ‘Apocalyptical Dance ‘(feat. Lucas Vidal)
09. ‘Sonic Expulsions’
10. ‘When Death Arrives’ (cover of Ruben Hakhverdyan song)
In other news, in May last year, Tankian revealed in his memoir Down With the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts) that his disdain for touring once led to his decision in 2017 to tell his bandmates in System Of A Down to carry on without him so they could continue living their dream.
Earlier this month, the band’s Daron Malakian opened up about testing the waters with a potential replacement for Tankian at that time, saying: “For me, System Of A Down is us four. If one of us four isn’t doing System Of A Down, I don’t really wanna do System Of A Down. Did we think about that? Sure. But did we really pursue it deeply? No. We tried. I don’t wanna get into names. We tried, and whoever we tried, he sounded good.”
In late July, drummer John Dolmayan weighed in on the potential of a new record saying that while it would be a stretch to make it work, the “secret sauce” to making an album would be for Malakian to bring in his ideas last because they’re typically nearly complete and leave little-to-no room for collaboration.
Last September, bassist Shavo Odadjian said that his “door is always open” to making new music with the band and that he had “a hundred riffs waiting”. In an interview in December, however, he told NME that the hopes of anything coming to fruition were still slim.
Tankian has taken a hot-and-cold approach to a new SOAD record as well. Back in October 2024 he said that a new System record would be a “fresh start in a brand new way”, but then later revealed that he had been put off recording after becoming “very passive” while working on ‘Mezmerize’ and ‘Hypnotize’.
