Hear Serj Tankian’s Solo ‘Justice Will Shine On,’ Written During System of a Down’s Early Days

On his new solo single, “Justice Will Shine On,” System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian reflects on the generational turmoil his ancestors have felt since the Armenian Genocide. He opens the song by asking his grandfather to speak of his childhood, before the genocide, and the anguish builds into a miasma of frustration that you can see on his face in the music video. “We are the children of all the survivors/Justice will shine on,” he sings in an angular melody over tortured riffs that he recorded with his backing band, the FCC. “We are the demons of all the deniers/Justice will shine on.” The song will feature on Tankian’s upcoming five-track EP, Foundations , due out via Gibson Records on Sept. 27. It is available for preorder now .

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Tankian wrote the song during System of a Down’s early days but didn’t record it until now. It follows another Foundations song, the punky “A.F. Day,” which Tankian wrote around the same time.

The artist looked back on his history and that of his Armenian ancestors recently in Down With the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts) , which came out earlier this year. In the book, he also reflected on the history of the band and explained some of the intra-band tensions that have pushed him to release solo music.

“The reason I’m putting [ Foundations ] out is that archival nature of writing a book made me look into songs from different periods of time,” Tankian told Metal Hammer in April. “So one of the songs is from early System days, for example, that I’ve never put out, that I’d never worked with System on. … It’s called Foundations basically because it’s the founding of my musical life.”

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In 2015, when System of a Down were embarking on a tour to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the genocide, Tankian told Rolling Stone why recognizing what happened to his grandparents’ generation — when Ottoman Turks executed around 1.5 million Armenians — was important. “Part of it is bringing attention to the fact that genocides are still happening, whether you use the word ‘genocide,’ ‘holocaust’ or ‘humanitarian catastrophe,'” he said. “None of that is changing. We want to be part of that change. We want the recognition of the first genocide of the 20th century to be a renewal of confidence that humanity can stop killing itself.”

In 2021, Tankian thanked President Biden for being the first U.S. president to recognize the genocide. “This is extremely important but only a milestone towards the long road of justice ahead with Turkey and its imminent need to do the same and make amends towards the descendants of 1.5 million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians systematically slaughtered by its Ottoman Turkish ancestors,” he wrote in a social media post at the time.

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