Shavo Odadjian knows his way around special herbs.
Though Revolver connects with the System of a Down bassist to discuss Seven Hours After Violet — his deathcore-and-more-inspired new band featuring members of Left to Suffer and Winds of Plague — a spicy side story involves the scrumptious, pan-seared steaks the Los Angeles-based musician has been flexing on his Instagram account lately, too. We know there’s habanero, rosemary, garlic and thyme involved, but Odadjian won’t fully detail the “secret rub” he puts on the meat, other than the fact that he found it somewhere in Arizona. Odadjian also admits that he owes his new bandmates a home-cooked meal. But then again, as the co-owner of cannabis lifestyle brand 22Red, he’s already keeping them plenty spiced.
“That’s the one thing about being a friend of mine: There is no shortage of herbs, because it’s what I do,” he explains of maintaining 22Red’s top-shelf line of potent flowers, concentrates, pre-rolls and vape pens. Odadjian takes pride in his seasoned tastebuds — he quality checks each strain himself — but he’s also happy to enlist the discerning palates of his many bandmates for official business.
“I use them as my testers sometimes,” he says. “I’ll give [Winds of Plague and SHAV guitarist] Morgoth [Beatz] four different jars, like, ‘Smoke this for a little while. Let me know what you think.’ Also, when I get concentrates and we’re testing those out, Daron [Malakian] from System is a really good judge for that.”
It’s fair to say that Odadjian’s music career has also relied on the inspired blending of his and his friends’ expert tastes. As a co-founding member of System of a Down, he played a crucial part in helping that bombastic foursome define the nu-metal era and become one of its most eclectic and biggest-selling acts. Though they occasionally reunite — this summer, for instance, they headlined a massive concert to 50,000 people at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park — outside of a pair of new singles in 2020, System’s musical output has been nonexistent since their last full-length release, 2005’s Hypnotize.
In System’s relative absence, Odadjian has kept his creativity up over the years while collaborating with Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA as experimental hip-hop faction AcHoZeN, and more recently while exploring distorted trap textures in North Kingsley. But Seven Hours After Violet — whose self-titled debut drops this fall on Odadjian’s new 1336 Records, an imprint of Sumerian Records — is the first time in a long while that the bassist has fully thrown himself into a metal-forward project. Funnily enough, 22Red is quite integral to how Odadjian put together this latest — and certainly heaviest — System side project yet.
A 2022 company event held at an L.A. hookah lounge is where Odadjian first met Michael Montoya, a.k.a. Morgoth Beatz, the Grammy-nominated producer who works with Polyphia, Suicide Silence, Machine Gun Kelly and others — at least when he’s not slinging brutal deathcore riffs in Winds of Plague. The musicians instantly hit it off, and when Odadjian later stopped by Morgoth’s SoCal home studio to jam, their bond was solidified. The chugging sonic interplay was so intense and infectious that they immediately brainstormed how to put their music out into the world.
“Originally [we planned to] write all the music instrumentally, and then every song would have a feature on it — kind of like the DJ Khaled of metal,” Odadjian explains. “I was thinking one song Serj [Tankian, SOAD’s frontman] would do. Maybe one song with Spencer [Charnas] from Ice Nine Kills, or Corey [Taylor]. Just cool vocalists I admire. That’s why in the early days of me talking about [the project], I said Jonathan Davis was involved. We were going to bring him on, but it didn’t happen on this record.”
The logistics of performing live with that kind of all-star roster is what made Odadjian reconsider his approach. That’s when Morgoth introduced the bassist to the dynamically disgusting sounds of Taylor Barber, the multifaceted vocal powerhouse for Atlanta deathcore bruisers Left to Suffer.
“We sent him a track, and then he did vocals in his bedroom and sent it back. Bro, this guy’s voice gave me chills,” Odadjian recalls.
Max McGuire
From there, Morgoth tapped Winds of Plague’s Josh Johnson to play drums, and recruited guitarist-vocalist Alejandro Aranda, a onetime American Idol contestant with a sincere love of metal, the voice of an angel and a guitar virtuoso’s skillset. With the lineup locked, they then had to come up with a band name. Someone suggested they be billed as a Shavo Odadjian solo project, but the bassist quickly vetoed that — thinking it would seem egotistical, and a bit comical. “Like, if my name was Paul, would I want Paul on there,” he says through a lightly exasperated laugh.
Somewhere along the way, a compromise was made to drop the “o” off “Shavo,” and reverse-engineer that into an acronym: Seven Hours After Violet.
The quintet bounced between Morgoth’s place and Odadjian’s North Hollywood 1336 Studios to write and record the 11-song Seven Hours After Violet. Their bond was cemented by the immersive experience — most of the band slept in the studios during the three-week creation process. “I’ve been doing this 30-plus years, and it’s not easy to develop strong relationships so fast,” Odadjian marvels of the group’s internal dynamic. “Every member is so sweet and so willing to put into the pot. No egos anywhere. So, we became close.”
There are stylistic touchstones between SHAV and SOAD — take the panicked dance-metal feel of the newer band’s “Alive” compared to something like System’s dizzying Toxicity classic “Deer Dance.” That’s only natural. Odadjian says it’s a vibe that’s coded into his DNA. But the bassist also stresses that he wanted SHAV’s genetics to mutate well beyond his origins: “Anything that sounded too much like System, I would say, ‘We’re not doing this.’”
Album opener “Paradise” sets the heavy precedent for SHAV’s new era, as its deathcore-stomped sections smash up against glitched-out production techniques. Barber bounces between a thick-necked rasp, bestial gutturals and a few pig-squeal-psycho highs, while Aranda adds surprising sensitivity with his vocal section. Elsewhere, the record balances Odadjian’s “crazy- fast” songs with violet-incandescent nu-ballads, electro-broken twitchiness, slow-crawl metal chunkiness and more. It’s a wide range of sounds that reflects the many interests of a multigenerational musical unit.
“They look up to me … and I look up to them, bro, because they keep me young,” Odadjian reveals. “If I need any advice about what’s going on right now, I turn to Morgoth and them. Like, ‘Does this sound modern — or am I the old fart coming up with a riff that might be outdated?’”
Odadjian has also played Seven Hours After Violet’s record for most of his brothers in System. Tankian gave the songs a thumbs-up while they were listening to them together during a car ride, and drummer John Dolmayan was equally supportive, telling Odadjian to “follow your heart” with the project.
“I mean, I’ll always be System of a Down,” the bassist admits, adding that he has a phone full of song ideas earmarked for System, should they ever return to album-writing mode. “Nothing’s going to take the place of that. But because System works so few and far between, I need to work. I’m always driven, and I was missing this in my life.”
Odadjian’s excitement over banging out heavy tunes with his new bandmates is undeniable, and the momentum behind Seven Hours After Violet is only picking up. For instance, SHAV will bring their deathcore to thousands of music fans at one of this year’s most-anticipated metal events: the relaunching of the Mayhem Festival in San Bernardino, California this October. It’s a big move, but they’re more than ready for the action.
“It’s already a moving juggernaut,” he says of Seven Hours After Violet business thus far, noting that a handful of tracks are already in the tank for a second full-length. Despite SHAV’s members also being pulled in different directions by their other projects, Odadjian confirms he’s in this for the long haul. “All my heart went into this,” he says. “It was an amazing thing to be able to do what I love, to do what I do best, and to do what I do easily. It’s literally a no-brainer to do this.”