System Of A Down

Before the platinum crossover, System Of A Down's debut is where Armenian folk melody, hardcore stops, and Serj Tankian's operatic-to-guttural swerve first cohered into something no other band could copy.

Rick Rubin's production keeps the guitars dry and close, so Daron Malakian's riffs snap between silence and full assault with almost comic precision, nowhere more than on "Sugar," which lurches from muttered paranoia to full-throated screaming inside a single bar. The album closes on "P.L.U.C.K.," a blunt reckoning with the Armenian genocide that turns the band's heritage into an accusation rather than a flourish, refusing to let the fury read as mere posturing. That mix of the deadly serious and the deliberately unhinged is what made the record impossible to file, and impossible to ignore. It set the terms for everything the band did next, but it never sounds like a warm-up.