System Of A Down have vowed to “drastically” switch up the setlists for their upcoming 2025 tour.
Last December, System Of A Down announced their longest stretch of tour dates in years as they take over South America in April and May, and North America in August and September.
The dates – all of which are sold out – will mark the first time since 2017 that the band are performing back-to-back shows for an extended period of time, having only played one or two shows a year in recent times.
Bassist Shavo Odadjian previously said that these shows are meant to “test the waters” following years of one-off shows. “The relationships were not as great as they are now. It’s just everybody wasn’t on the same page. We’ve been talking. Everything’s great, knock on wood. Everyone’s happy,” he told SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk in January.
Now, in a new interview with SNSMix.com, Odadjian says that the back-to-back shows will present different setlists on each night.
“We’ll probably change the set up drastically between each one so if you come to both shows you’ll hear different songs,” Odadjian said.
“We’re going to play two-hour sets. We’ll go through the catalog. We’ve got 70-plus songs, but we’ll do 30 of them — maybe 27 to 30 songs — and we’ll mix and match.
“We’re going to rehearse a lot so we can know a lot and then we can switch songs up between sets all the time, not play the same thing over and over.” Watch Odadjian talk about the upcoming System Of A Down shows below (skip to 28:28).
As for what the tour might mean for new music, Odadjian clarified in January that nothing’s set in stone per Blabbermouth: “I can’t promise. We haven’t said anything. Like I said, man, there is no pressure.
“We said, ‘Let’s get together. Let’s play these shows, see how it goes.’ We haven’t done this many shows… Literally, we’re doing more shows this year than we have the last seven years combined. So, let’s do that first and see where that takes us.”
The group haven’t put out an album since their two 2005 releases: ‘Mezmerize’ and ‘Hypnotize’, and speaking with Metal Hammer last year, frontman Serj Tankian revealed he “became very passive” during the writing and recording process for those.
Speaking to NME in December, however, Odadjian revealed that he was unsure what the singer meant by the comments, and said that the hopes of new music are still slim.
“I don’t know what he means by that,” Odadjian said. “We’ve done things a certain way in our career where it’s always going in a new direction. Every time we do something new, it’s in a direction you don’t expect. Process-wise, we’ll have to see when we get together. If it goes in a way that works for one person but not the others, we won’t do it. It has to work for all four of us.”
In January, guitarist Daron Malakian also admitted to Rick Rubin in his podcast that he’s “not sure how much I want” a new System Of A Down album “anymore”.
“It would have been nice to see where the band would have evolved if we kept putting music out. If we put out an album now, it’s just so far away from [‘Mezmerize’ and ‘Hypnotize’] it doesn’t continue the story to me.”