The Bad Penny (beta)

“Wake up!” With those two words, the weirdest mainstream-crossover metal song of this century (its video has 1.5 billion views and counting on YouTube) still also stands as the loudest clarion call we’ve heard since Rage Against the Machine. That band’s protégé-ish followers, System of Down, took the baton from Rage and went on to come one of the most important “political” albums of this century: Toxicity.

Unfortunately and ironically, political differences between the band members halted them writing new material, but Toxicity stands as the boldest political heavy record of the past quarter-century.

Read my full review of Toxicity in Treble‘s tremendous new feature, The Best Albums of the 21st Century: Speaking the Truth.

If you dig SOAD and what they stand for, this article might be of interest to you: On Tyranny: 10 Great Protest Records by Refused, Lamb of God, PJ Harvey, Divide and Dissolve, More

Find more on System of a Down, including their six upcoming concerts and more, visit their website.

This entry was posted on 09/21/2026 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Album Reviews, Features, Reviews with tags Daron Malakian, fascism, John Dolmayan, protest music, Serj Tankian, Shavo Odadjian, System of a Down. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.