For months – and even years – now, John Dolmayan has been publicly calling on his System Of A Down bandmates to “put the bullshit aside” and work on new music together, even telling Kerrang! earlier this year, “We’d have been making an album now if it was up to me.” Now, though, the drummer seems to have accepted that a follow-up to 2005’s Mezmerize and Hypnotize probably isn’t going to happen.
In a new interview for this weekend’s virtual Download TV, John explains how “simple” it would be for the alt-metal titans to make a new record, admitting, “We have the music. We just can’t get out of our own way on that one.” He adds that even if the band – completed by Serj Tankian, Daron Malakian and Shavo Odadjian – could record one new song together, “it would break the ice” and they would end up with much more material.
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“But there’s egos involved and, quite frankly, wisdom isn’t always something you achieve in older age – sometimes you achieve stubbornness, and we just can’t get out of our own way on that one,” he continues. “But I would like to say that it is a band issue. I know that certain members of my band have been blamed in the past, but at the end of the day it takes four people to make the music we make and it takes four people not to make it.
“So I want the fans to know that as much as I personally want it to happen, or have wanted it to happen in the past, there are things that that are not in anybody’s control, and no one member of System Of A Down is greater than the other – especially in regards to making an album.
John concludes: “So unless the four of us get on the same page at the exact same time and the stars align, I think it’s very unlikely that we’ll make new music, which is a sadness, because I think we have a lot to offer still.”
