System of a Down leader Serj Tankian was very deliberate in choosing the songs for this collection of unreleased material from his past. The five tracks on Foundations—some of which date back nearly 30 years—are meant as companions to his 2024 memoir, Down With the System. “When I was writing the memoir, I was referencing a lot of the music, whether it was System of a Down or my own solo stuff over the years,” Tankian tells Apple Music. “It was part of the way of telling the story, because it fit certain periods of my life, and you can see the influence of the philosophy of the time within the lyrics of the songs.” At the same time, Tankian was mixing a bunch of old songs that he hadn’t released. “It made me think, ‘Hey, these songs belong in that period that I was just writing about in that chapter, and I should probably put these out.’ So, it kind of became this thought process of, ‘Now that we’re talking about the past, let’s listen to the past.’” Of course, Tankian’s vaults contain much more material than the five songs here. “I have thousands of tracks. A lot of them are instrumental, but over a hundred are vocal,” he says. “These five were rock in the same type of sense, and they danced well together.” Beyond a little bit of correcting here and there, Tankian left the archival tracks largely in their original form, for posterity. “I can’t sing the same way I did 30 years ago,” he says. “I have a different voice now, so I wanted to hear that and feel that. I just love the fact that all these songs have a part of me from different times of my career. I can see the progression in them—and maybe a regression.” Below, he comments on each track. “A.F. Day” “I think this is the oldest song here. It’s either that or ‘Justice Will Shine On.’ I can’t remember ever bringing ‘A.F. Day’ to System, which is kind of weird, because you would think that it would work perfectly in that space. It’s very much an anti-establishment song, a punk song. It’s someone going through either a 9-to-5 hell or going to a situation of indoctrination and feeling like there’s no space for colors, there’s no space for creativity, there’s no space for being an iconoclast in any way. Just like some people wake up and say, ‘Another beautiful day today,’ other people go, ‘Another fucking day today,’ right? It’s that. It’s a young person with a lot of vitality, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration.” “Justice Will Shine On” “This is another one that was written at least 25 or 30 years ago, if not longer. It was originally done with just electric guitar and vocals, and then I slowly added instrumentation and kind of finished it in 2015. It’s a song that I wrote about my grandparents and their experience of surviving the Armenian Genocide, and why it’s important for us to recognize genocide as the first step in prevention of genocide. Unfortunately, it hasn’t helped, because we see genocide occurring in our own age. So, it has a very dark side but a hopeful chorus. It’s a beautiful song in that sense.” “Appropriations” “The original version of this is a bunch of delayed guitars that I had played with some beats, and it wasn’t a complete song. Then, I got an offer from a streaming service—I do a lot of film composing and TV composing—to do a title track for a new TV series. So, I repurposed those guitars for a 30-second theme song. The streaming service paid me a kill fee and ended up going with something else, but I liked this so much that I decided to make it into a full song. So, I appropriated my own music. That’s why I call it that. The lyrics are about community and the need to really foster love and lack of judgment and creativity. It’s our only way out of the mess that we’ve created with this so-called civilization.” “Cartoon Buyer” “In some ways, I would say this is a love song. It’s a bit dark, but it’s a love song, and it was written at a time when I felt those longings of lost love. But the breakdown part is very unifying. I’m talking about different countries—they are us and we are them. It’s a universal message, a Buddhist message in a way. I am the guy that I’m honking at who just cut in front of me, because I did the same fucking shit yesterday. So, who the fuck am I to judge? The other side of that is, if you open a door for someone today, they might open a door for someone tomorrow. The other cool thing is that [System of a Down drummer] John Dolmayan played drums on this song back in 2006 or 2007, so I have him in the video as well.” “Life’s Revengeful Son” “This was written before my second solo album, Imperfect Harmonies. It was part of that suite of music, but I ended up not using it on that record because it just didn’t fit for some reason. It’s very post-apocalyptic. It has different messages in it, but I think of it as Jesus in the streets carrying a car axle instead of the cross—very much like an end-times Mad Max kind of thing. It’s surreal but modern at the same time. It’s a scary song in a way, but in the breakdown I mention ‘Sweet Caroline.’ I didn’t steal it, but I must have conjured up Neil Diamond in some way. It’s a very rocking song.”