Daron Malakian has strong opinions about what’s missing in heavy music today: danger and risk. “I think you have a generation of fans who are very easily offended,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Offensiveness and shock should not be taken away from rock music in general.”
Those qualities are inherent in “Killing Spree,” the bloodthirsty first single off Addicted to the Violence, the new album from Daron Malakian and Scars on Broadway, due out July 18. “Insanity/Controlling me,” he sings in the song’s chorus, “Society/The kids are on a killing spree.” Built on manic, strobing guitars and undulating waves of distortion, the music feels both cutting and brutalizing. “It’s gonna feel like a Jesus comin’ back,” he sings, stretching the last word heavenward with giddy, helium-like aplomb. “It’s gonna feel like the devil’s on the attack.”
“I think the song ‘Killing Spree’ is a subject that I don’t think a lot of people want to touch,” Malakian, 49, says via email. “I don’t care, I’ll touch it because it exists. It’s not to be shocking or offensive, but it exists, and that’s what I’ll write about if I want to. I’m not going to edit myself if someone is going to be offended. I think that’s missing in heavy metal music.”
He’s reluctant to explain the song — “Your kids are on a killing spree, so your kids have something to do with it,” he says vaguely — partially because he doesn’t see anything controversial about the subject matter of killing sprees. “We live in a world, and things happen in this world, and killing sprees are one of those things that I’ve seen happen kind of often in the last 15 years or so — but I actually wrote the song way before that,” he says. Moreover, he looks at the song as commentary more than a transgressive statement. “It’s not for or against anything,” he says. “It just is.”
These days, Malakian says he just writes songs for the sake of it. As guitarist-singer for System of a Down, he’s been keeping busy touring with them. Since that band has reached a creative stalemate, at least when it comes to making a new album (they did record a couple of songs a few years ago), he has been slowly working on a follow-up to the last Scars on Broadway album, Dictator, which came out in 2018. That album contained songs he had once hoped to record with System of a Down; Addicted to the Violence, he says, is more general.
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“At this point in my life, I don’t write any songs for System or for Scars,” he says. “I just write songs. I think if System was making an album, some of those songs would probably end up on a System album, but System does not make albums these days, so they go to Scars.”
Malakian had recorded Dictator as a distraction from “some personal things going on with my family and my life,” so he recorded a bunch of songs in the space of two weeks, doing everything himself, from the vocals and guitars to the drums. Addicted to the Violence has been a more considered affair that found him collaborating on songwriting with his friend, multi-instrumentalist Orbel Babayan, drummer Roman Lomtadze, and saxophonist Matthew “Narducci” Silberman.
“This album probably took me longer than any album I’ve ever made to decide it was done,” Malakian says. “On this one, I did more home demos, recorded some stuff at home, picked the songs in my rolodex of songs that were like, ‘Let’s record this one, see how it goes.’”
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Scars on Broadway first recorded the songs at Malakian’s home, but it didn’t sound right, so they went to a studio, recutting everything but the vocals. He estimates it took close to two years to get everything the way he wanted it. “I was in no rush,” he says. “I’m never in any rush. I’m sure people who like what I do realize I don’t put out an album every year. … That’s just my process.”
So will people be able to hear these songs in a concert setting? “I have plans to play live, but I don’t have any tours scheduled or anything like that,” he says. “But I definitely have plans to play live.”
