Serj Tankian, courtesy,

Like thumbing through the pages of an old photo album, Serj Tankian looked to create a musical archive with his new EP, Foundations. The singer, songwriter and System of a Down frontman saw how his memoir, “Down With the System: A Memoir (of Sorts),” resonated with fans and applied that same conceptual thinking to his music.

“I’ve mixed a lot of songs with vocals, most of which have never been released,” Tankian said in a recent video call. “These kind of belonged together, they’re all pretty much straight rock, and I thought they’d be cool to put out.”

The five-track collection is a trip through his career. Some songs have the sonic hard rock signatures of System of a Down while others take on different musical landscapes like blues and melodic rock.

“I’m kind of like Patient No. 1,” Tankian said. “As an artist you get influenced by different things, but you don’t really think about it; then when you create, they come through you in a varied format. You want them to be varied; otherwise, they’d be replicas of the original!”

Tankian said he was surprised that the songs, written decades apart, seemed to belong together. Writing songs for himself was a very different exercise than scoring a film or writing for System of a Down, he added. For his band, there’s an existing color palette. For himself, the canvas was blank, ready to be filled with whatever inspiration brought.

“I think as an artist you have to trick yourself into being creative because your hands go to the same keys on the piano if you’re not careful,” he said.

Each song began with a guitar, piano, lyric or a sonic loop, which Tankian said he would remove after he built a melodic structure around it.

Foundations offers a chance to hear Tankian’s progression as a vocalist and as a songwriter, and how his perspective changed with time.

“You can’t write that song in the same way again that you did 25 or 30 years ago. Your voice is not going to sound the same as it did. You wouldn’t play the guitar the same way you did. Everything changes,” Tankian said. “There’s values in the archival process; I wanted to hear my voice from 25 or 30 years ago.”

Tankian found that the imperfections of the demos—he kept the original vocal tracks—helped make the EP a time capsule. On one song, the original electronic drum pattern wasn’t in time with the rest of the music; he re-did that. He called the original demos “horrible” but that he made the risk to keep many of their aspects in to keep the project authentic.

“It wouldn’t be as honest as an archival experience,” he said. “[But] there were certain elements I couldn’t live with. You don’t want to lose quality control to become archivally correct.”

Tankian said he’s often asked why the songs never became part of the System of a Down songbook. He doesn’t have an answer to that, or if he even shared them with bandmates Daron Malakian, Shavo Odadjian and John Dolmayan.

The poignant “Justice Will Shine On” might even predate System of a Down. The song chronicles his grandparents’ experience during the Armenian genocide. SOAD considered recording it in 2015 for the 100-year commemoration of that event. That’s when Tankian added the chorus. It wasn’t until 2019 that U.S. Congress formally recognized the genocide occurred.  The singer has been vocal about the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It’s been a fight that’s defined System of a Down.

“For us it’s a personal issue. All of our grandparents are survivors,” Tankian said. “It was always a hypocrisy to be in a country that we all were born in or grew up in was not recognizing one of the preeminent crimes of history in the last century.”

Tankian said progress has been made on the issue, but that the “ugliness of geopolitics” has stopped countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand from taking a similar step as America. That’s why he said “Justice Will Shine On” still sharply resonates even though he wrote it decades ago.

“Unfortunately, irrespective to this type of awareness, genocide is still happening today in multiple places around the world,” he said. “You hope that recognition will be the first step in the prevention of genocide, but it hasn’t been. It’s been really sad.”

That backdrop of politics added an additional layer of context to the band’s recent Golden Gate Park show in front of 50,000 fans.

“There is definitely cultural significance to our show in San Francisco, being an anti-authoritarian band, that was palpable for me,” Tankian said.

With System of a Down’s limited touring schedule, Tankian found time to pursue other creative projects, like his book, this EP, and his Kavat Coffee Shop and Eye For Sound Gallery in Los Angeles.

“Doing art and opening up a cafe gallery and doing things where there’s interaction with people coming in and trying the coffee, talking about the art or buying a T-shirt—it brings all of that into a physicality that I’m really enjoying right now,” Tankian said, noting that music is often an intangible art that exists only online.

He’s not planning to tour the new songs, Tankian did want to bring a live element to the project and recruited his solo band, The FCC, to film live performances for all the Foundations songs in one day

“They said it can’t be done, and whenever I hear something like that I think, ‘We’re definitely doing this!'” he said.

Follow writer Mike DeWald at Twitter.com/mike_dewald.