10 Rock Albums Made Out Of Obligation

After the huge influx of fans that System of a Down got off of Toxicity, people were foaming at the mouth for what was on the horizon. The last album may have had traces of nu metal laced throughout it, but the pointed lyrical themes and some of the beefiest riffs that Daron Malakian would ever create would lead to a few fans getting a little bit antsy, scouring the dark corners of the Internet to find some kind of peek at the new record. Once they found some of the demos of what the band had originally been working on, Steal This Album was just confirming what most of us already knew.

Originally looking to create something that was a lot more nuanced than their raw metal aesthetic, Steal This Album actually went under the moniker of Toxicity 2 for a while, sounding like the band were taking the logical next step from what Chop Suey and Toxicity had given us. In reality, most of what turns up on here were either fragments of the last album or some new songs that were just thrown in, which the band called Steal This Album in reference to the novel Steal This Book, trying to make the most of the musical pirating.

Then again, this is not a step below by any stretch of the imagination, with Serj and Daron having amazing chemistry on songs like Boom and even trying to take their sound to even greater heights on songs like Innervision. There's the crux of a great System of a Down project on here, but the story behind the record makes it feel more like a B-sides collection than anything else.