Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian is the singer and keyboardist of System of a Down, the band he co-founded in Los Angeles in 1994. Born in Beirut in 1967 to an Armenian family that emigrated to California when he was seven, he brought to American metal a voice that refuses to stay in a single register. That refusal is the method. Within a single track Tankian moves from near-operatic singing to a scream, from a whisper to declamation, from melodic leaps resembling a yodel to passages in modes of Armenian origin. The instability is not ornament — it mirrors the abrupt genre swerves the band practises, and it is what makes Toxicity (2001) sound heavy, comic and threatening at once. The album reached number one in the United States a week before 11 September, and "Chop Suey!" ended up pulled from radio lists in the climate that followed. His political work is inseparable from the music. Tankian devoted decades to the campaign for international recognition of the Armenian genocide, founded the organisation Axis of Justice with Tom Morello, and publicly criticised American foreign policy at moments when doing so was costly. Solo, he released Elect the Dead (2007), Imperfect Harmonies (2010) and Harakiri (2012), besides composing orchestral music and film scores. He is the subject of the documentary Truth to Power (2020) and published the memoir Down with the System in 2024.