System Of A Down’s Shavo Odadjian has explained why Korn singer Jonathan Davis didn’t make his expected collaboration with the bassist’s Seven Hours After Violet project.
In April 2023, Odadjian said that Davis will appear on a song on Seven Hours After Violet’s debut album, in what seemed set to be a nu metal team-up for the ages. However, when Seven Hours After Violet came out in October, the Korn man was nowhere in sight.
Now, talking to KOMP, the bassist says the track he hoped for Davis to guest on eventually became Paradise, Seven Hours After Violet’s noticeably feature-free debut single.
‘Morgoth [Seven Hours After Violet guitarist Michael Montoya] had a chorus he had sang for [Davis] a while back,” he explains (via Blabbermouth). “’Cause he produces a lot of bands, and he’s worked with Jonathan Davis. And he’s like, ‘Let’s write a song around this and then play it for him and see if he digs it.’ And it just didn’t work out well.”
Although Odadjian doesn’t say outright why the Davis feature was abandoned, he notes that, if he were to collaborate with the singer, he’d get him to try something new: “I want him to work on this with us, not just have a part that he's done 10 years ago and have that regurgitated.”
He adds, “So that’s what it was. It was nothing on him. He’s amazing. We’re friends. I love Jonathan. So it’s, like, we can work together any day, any time. And we will.”
Odadjian also reveals that Seven Hours After Violet was initially planned to feature a different singer on each song. The concept was eventually rejected, however, and the band have Taylor Barber as their full-time vocalist.
“But at the time when I announced that [Davis would appear on the album], we were making that song and it was still gonna be a record filled with features,” the bassist continues. “We weren’t gonna get our own singer, we weren’t gonna have our own band. It was gonna be an album of my music with featured vocalists on there from around the planet.”
Odadjian spoke about the aborted Davis collaboration during a conversation with Metal Hammer in January. “When it was going to be all features, I was going to work with Jonathan Davis and told somebody that,” he said. “Next thing I know, that news is everywhere and then the record changed so we never actually used it!
“He did a verse on Paradise and it sounded fucking great. But it didn’t make sense [for this record]. So we wanted to make sure when we do use Jonathan, it’ll be the absolute fucking best.”
Seven Hours After Violet was the first album Odadjian made since System Of A Down’s double album Mezmerize and Hypnotize in 2005. System are currently in the midst of a studio album dry spell that doesn’t seem set to change any time soon, but the band have plenty of live plans for 2025. They include a South American tour for April and May and a North American stadium tour for August and September. The North American run will be composed of six co-headline shows, two each with Avenged Sevenfold, Korn and Deftones.
