It's a pretty well known fact at this point that Daron Malakian's Scars On Broadway ended up using some material that was meant for the System Of A Down record that's never going to happen. So how close were we to new music from the latter?
According to Malakian in an interview with Consequence Of Sound, the opening track to Scars' 2018 album Dictator titled "Lives" was rehearsed a few times as a new System Of A Down song.
“Well, I’m the main writer for System Of A Down, so when there’s talk about maybe making an album, a lot of that kind of comes down on my shoulders to produce that album. And so the ‘Dictator‘ album along with a lot of other material that I have — I mean my writing works for System Of A Down or Scars On Broadway. They both kind of have my style of writing there.
So, I kind of waited to see what was happening with System Of A Down, to see if we were going to do an album, we may need some of these songs. So, I just kind of held onto them. So yeah, I thought certain songs on ‘Dictator‘ might’ve worked with System Of A Down, and we actually rehearsed the opening track (“Lives“) live with System Of A Down once or twice, thinking of releasing that as a System song, but we just never did.”
Listen below to "Lives", which now with this information in mind would've sounded pretty cool with Serj Tankian's vocals on it. To me, "Lives" sounds like a bridge between Steal This Album! and Mesmerize. Oh well.
