On August 13, 2006, System Of A Down played their last show. Granted, it wouldn’t be their last ever show, but for guitarist/co-vocalist Daron Malakian, it felt like it could have been. In May, the band had announced plans to go on an ‘indefinite hiatus’. They had spent the better part of a decade clawing their way up the ranks of the metal world and now, hitting the apex of their powers – their last two releases, a staggered double-album of Mezmerize and Hypnotize, released in May and November 2005, had topped the US Billboard album charts – they were riding off into the sunset.
“My life was dedicated to System Of A Down,” he admits. “I pretty much gave my whole existence to writing these last System albums. Now, all of a sudden there wasn’t a home for my songs anymore. So it was like, ‘I’m still writing, but for what?’”
As one of the band’s chief songwriters, Daron hadn’t exactly struggled for creative outlets. By his own reckoning, he’d always brought “30 or 40 song ideas” into recording sessions. But even as he toured and wrote relentlessly with System Of A Down, it wasn’t enough to completely scratch his creative itches. So he formed another band – one that would prove his salvation when his main group collapsed in 2006.
The seeds for Scars On Broadway were sown as early as 2001. Fresh from writing SOAD’s breakthrough album Toxicity, Daron moved into a new house and began “playing around” on synthesisers.
“Even before any music, demo or anything, I’d thought of Scars as being my more electronic, gothy type project,” Daron reveals. “A lot of the early Scars stuff was composed with synth, drum machines and a post-punk vibe; the second album not so much.”
At that point, the songs were just a fun, throwaway idea Daron had to indulge his other creative impulses away from the metallic heft of System. But that’s not to say there wasn’t overlap. While coming up with SOAD hit B.Y.O.B., he hit a creative wall.
“I didn’t have a bridge,” he recalls. “I’d written the verses and choruses for B.Y.O.B. but hadn’t got a way of bringing it back in. The whole ‘Blast Off!’ part was its own song at that time [written for Scars]. So I realised it was sitting around and I wasn’t doing anything with it; I should try and incorporate it.”
That was the first hint that this Scars On Broadway thing had legs. B.Y.O.B. became System’s highestcharting single – hitting No.27 on the Billboard Hot 100 – and Daron continued to write furiously for both projects, coming up with four songs that would prove the foundation for Scars On Broadway’s eponymous debut album: Funny, World Long Gone, Whoring Streets and the song that would ultimately announce them to the world, They Say.
At the same time, Scars had expanded their membership. No longer just Daron mucking around on synths, he’d recruited other people to jam with. But nobody seemed to gel with Daron as much as his bandmates in System Of A Down. So when that band imploded, he recruited them… or some, anyway.
“Scars went through a lot of different variations before we got to the first real line-up,” Daron recalls. “There were other line-ups before that, which for one reason or another just didn’t work out. We were very much in experimental mode.”
Initially, Daron spoke to bassist Shavo Odadjian about collaborating in the Scars project. Ultimately, the pair decided against it, but he did retain John Dolmayan behind the drumkit, adding a familiar presence that would reshape the ‘post-punky’ tracks Daron had written while working on Mezmerize and Hypnotize.
“I brought those songs in and we just started playing them as a rock band,” he says. “I never really pushed back on that, to say they’d been very different to start with, more inspired by Joy Division and Sisters Of Mercy. So the keyboard line I’d written I now played instead as a rock riff and everything just came together.”
Unfortunately, Scars didn’t have breathing room to savour their creative impulses. System had barely been put on pause before it was announced that vocalist Serj Tankian was striking out as a solo artist. Eyes were on the rest of his former bandmates to see what they would do next.
“I felt pressure to write more songs and get a new band going,” Daron says. “It was a strange time in life for me in general, because we’d worked so hard to get System where it was and I would have been down to continue; it wasn’t me that wanted to stop. It was tough.”
Nonetheless, he persevered. With guitarist Franky Perez and keyboardist Danny Shamoun, Scars On Broadway’s line-up stabilised and the band headed into the studio to record their self-titled debut album. As one of the songs that had paved the way for Scars’ transformation from post-punk piss-around to Daron’s new squeeze, They Say was an obvious choice for lead single from the record. It also upheld the political bent that had come to define System Of A Down’s later years.
“Lyrically, it was about living in a society where politics, life and tragedy intersect,” Daron muses. “In the background was this sense that the world is gonna end – at that point they started to say it’s because of climate change, but I remember when I was a kid it was a nuclear war. Now it could be both!”
“That whole line, ‘They say it’s all about to end’ is about this apocalyptic backdrop to all this other shit happening – ‘I watched the President kiss his family… / …I watched the President fuck society’,” he continues. “It’s someone sitting outside and observing all of that at once. It has a very punk attitude. Originally it didn’t, but the rendition everyone’s heard has this fist-in-theair drive to it. I was pulling out my [Sex] Pistols and Dead Boys influences.”
Released on March 28, 2008, They Say certainly generated excitement around Scars On Broadway. With a massive hook, a stomping riff, and Daron’s familiar vocal tones, the track offered a taste of familiarity for fans of System, as well as an indication of the new, less harsh direction the guitarist was taking. When their debut album was released on July 29, 2008, it reached No.17 on the Billboard 200.
Live dates followed, including an appearance at Coachella festival and a brief UK run, but with just 10 days to go before the band were due to tour the US – including an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! – Daron cancelled all upcoming dates, saying, “[my] heart isn’t in it.”
“I didn’t want to just grind myself to nothing,” he says now. “I was still mourning my band, but here I am getting married again. It was a weird time to just be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna go on tour again’, and even having John joining me felt like I was hanging on to my [old] band in some ways.”
It set a precedent for how Daron – and Scars On Broadway – would operate in future: entirely on their own terms.
“My father is an artist and he paints only for himself,” Daron offers by way of explanation. “The only art of his the world has seen are the covers for Mezmerize and Hypnotize, and on the covers of the Scars records. So, I write songs for me; Scars is something I do at my pace.”
“When the label got involved and we had to dedicate ourselves to touring and all that stuff, I knew I didn’t wanna do things like that,” he continues. “I don’t want somebody selling my songs to people – I prefer to reach them in an organic way. I’d tasted the whole thing where they take your song and put it out on the radio and it ends up becoming fucking propaganda.”
But even with System Of A Down returning to (live) duty in 2011, Daron has continued to tinker with Scars On Broadway. Although he has remained the only consistent member, the band still make sporadic live appearances and even put out a second album, Dictator, in 2018. In October 2024, they also played their first show in five years when they joined the bill of Korn’s 30th anniversary celebration at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, where They Say proved it had stood the test of time.
“Dude, we haven’t played for five years, I haven’t released anything for, like, six… People were singing along to this with their fists in the air and there was a fucking circle-pit going,” Daron marvels. “I’m amazed, man. I’m watching it like, ‘People really like these songs?!’”
And as for whether he’d ever consider returning Scars to their post-punk roots, the jury’s out – for now. “Maybe in the future of Scars I’ll make it more what I’d originally envisioned it to be,” he muses. “But that won’t be the next album; that’s already recorded and is heavy!”
