“The sound of life at its best”: What happened when System Of A Down brought Toxicity to Tottenham

Almost three hours before the sight and sound of System Of A Down invites the question “is this the weirdest and most extreme group ever to headline a venue of this size?”, tonight's opening act, Acid Bath, bring their own note of incongruity to the palatial surroundings of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Since reuniting in 2024, following a 27-year hiatus, these once-fringe but suddenly rather popular Louisianan low-end groovers are enjoying a (figurative and literal) TikTok-enabled moment in the sun. Armed with music that sounds as if it was forged in a swamp, in London, their half-hour set is an appropriate amuse bouche for a stadium baking in the last of the day’s piercing rays.

For their part, Queens Of The Stone Age are by now long accustomed to gracing surroundings as spacious as these. Owning the joint from the off, white-vested bandleader Josh Homme needs barely a bar of opening track Regular John to mark his territory as the kind of alpha-male badass who can silence a room with only the arch of an eyebrow. Possessed of serious swagger and no end of swing, the music, meanwhile, sounds like it was made by men capable of stripping the engine of a flatbed truck with one hand while fighting an alligator with the other. By the time the hour-long set closes out with No One Knows and Song For The Dead, the stadium is starting to pop.

But the night belongs to the headliners. If Queens are the sound of America in all its vast expanse, System Of A Down are the coiled and frenetic energy of the melting pot city. As the stands of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium literally shake with the force of feet bouncing to the beat of bangers such as B.Y.O.B. and Chop Suey!, the crepuscular evening air begins to heave with contradictions. Despite being piled high with old and familiar cuts, for one thing, the set sounds as if it was brought here from the future. More remarkable still is a tangible edge of defiance and subversion – think Dead Kennedys – that somehow survives a night in a venue that charges £3.80 for a plastic cup of piss-warm water.

They even defy logic. Since last appearing in London – at the 12,000 capacity OVO Arena Wembley, in 2015 – System Of A Down have somehow increased their pulling power at least tenfold. On this, the first of two sold-out dates at the city’s largest Premier League ground, the audience spans the generational divide. From young children with ear-mufflers to middle age metalheads who may well have caught the band’s early-doors set as openers to Slayer and Sepultura at the Astoria in 1998, everyone is standing. With the soaring vocals of frontman Serj Tankian and guitarist Daron Malakian drawing melody from the madness, from golden circle to nosebleeds, needles are in the red.

It's a blast, is what it is. Despite bearing all the hallmarks of a cash-grabbing nostalgia trip, songs such as Hypnotize and Chic ‘N’ Stu, Bounce and Lost In Hollywood seem baked to order using only the freshest ingredients. Perhaps this is the least that can be expected from the very best – and certainly the most original – of the class of high-achieving innovators who helped guide metal out of the late-20th Century cul-de-sac in which the movement found itself. It may seem like a slight point, but even the absence of tattoos on the flesh of its four members speak of a refusal to conform to the genre’s universally accepted norms.

Tonight, in Tottenham, it‘s a pleasure to be in the company of such an eternally unusual and talented band. From the astoundingly cohesive rhythm section of drummer John Dolmayan and bassist Shavo Odadjian, to the multicultural magic on display in virtually every crevice, System Of A Down are both a corrective and a rebuttal to the prevailing forces of nativism and darkness. With its palate of colour and variety, theirs is the sound of life at its best.

Read this next:

• "I mean every word that I say, every lyric that I sing, every noise that I make": Meet the real Serj Tankian
• “I don’t want to seem like I’m riding my own coat-tails”: Inside Shavo Odadjian’s new band, Seven Hours After Violet
• Daron Malakian: “The alternative is that I could have been a solider for Saddam Hussein… God knows how that would have ended up”