Review: Daron Malakian and Scars On Broadway – Addicted To The Violence

July 21, 2025

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“CANCEL ME, I DON’T GIVE A FUCK!” (A real lyric from this album)

I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think about nu-metal or 2000s rock, System of a Down is easily one of the greatest bands to enter the mainstream zeitgeist. Viciously brash and politically salient, System’s first three records are exceptional, containing some of the most radical and vital music of their time. Few of their peers would be able to write a song as immediate and impactful as “P.L.U.C.K.,” “Chop Suey,” “Prison Song,” or “Boom!” (not that many of them bothered to stretch beyond butt-rock balladry and promo songs for the WWE). After these 3 LPs, the group’s trajectory from the self-titled to Steal this Album! culminated in a duo of records far more scattershot than previous works. Mezmerize and Hypnotize are incredibly mixed bags with some of the group’s best and worst material. For every “B.Y.O.B.,” “Attack,” or “Question,” there’s an asinine clownfest like “She’s Like Heroin,” “Lonely Day,” or “Old School Hollywood” waiting within the ~75 minutes of material. Much like The Beatles and their white album, this sister-album-project was a lengthy look into the disparate musical excursions of a band on the brink of collapse with less left on the cutting room floor than you’d hope (except that White Album is far more consistent despite dwarfing Mezmerize and Hypnotize in length).

While Daron Malakian has always been the main credited composer of SOAD, it’s hard to ignore that the songs he takes center stage on are more often duds than the ones that Serj Tankian helms (although I can not overlook the insanely obnoxious “Vicinity of Obscenity”). Malakian’s lyrics fair even worse, with some of the band’s most ham-fisted and undignified stanzas on songs like “Violent Pornography” and the previously mentioned travesty of “She’s Like Heroin.” This (sort of) double LP was commercially and critically successful at the time, but ultimately indicative of a fracture within the collective’s ranks. This fissure gave way to the current topic of review: Scars on Broadway. Formed by guitarist/songwriter Daron Malakian and drummer/chud John Dolmayan (along with a few others joining later), Scars had a self-titled record ready by 2008. This album was decently successful as a side-project/follow-up-group, but deviated away from quite a lot of what made the previous band’s work so special, with even worse tactless lyrics and a far more lightweight, pop-aspiring sound. A few half-decent hooks on songs like “They Say” fail to save a disposable excursion that sounded dated upon release. Especially when compared to the surprisingly strong debut Serj record Elect the Dead, it’s hard to see Scars on Broadway as much more than a synthesis of what weighed down the last two System records.

Regardless of what anyone thought, this incarnation of Scars was not fated to last, as the group went on hiatus not long after the record’s release and would be dissolved after a brief reunion in 2010 that failed to result in more than a few shows, two singles, and an untitled record that never came to fruition. A whole decade removed from Scars on Broadway, that mysterious sophomore release was announced as Dictator, an album of tracks originally intended for the System lineup recorded by Malakian exclusively in a week in 2012. Containing material that was being hinted at in 2010, this record, while still not great, is a far less grating collection of songs (with “Angry Guru” being the closest to the infuriating material from the 2008 record like “Chemicals”). It’s a clear improvement from punishingly annoying, but Dictator still contains much of what makes Malakian’s work frustrating: corny songs with cringe-inducing lyrics and overly quirky songwriting. All this said, Malakian rebirthed the band, appended his name to the beginning of the moniker (lmao), and assembled a new band to perform these songs live with. Now, after another years-long hiatus, the group returns to an even stranger cultural climate than 2008 or 2018, be it musically or politically.

Maybe it was my own nostalgia and appreciation for the System records or a morbid curiosity of what an alt-rock side-project’s third incarnation would look like in the year-of-our-lord-who-must-hate-us 2025, but I aimed to come into Addicted To The Violence with the most open of minds. After all, this would be Malakian’s first record of material written and recorded within the last 10+ years; maybe we’d see a more mature artist with more potent and thoughtful things to say. Unless you’re new to this whole “nerds getting mad about music” thing, I think you can guess the answer.

The latest and (not-so) greatest from Daron Malakian and Scars on Broadway is immediately recognizable as a proposition of a bygone era. Clearly as promising as a Velvet Revolver reunion or a new record from 12 Stones, Addicted To The Violence comes to us complete with a clip art album cover, 10 new tracks of radio rock for a radioless world, and a nearly silent album rollout that’s anything but encouraging. The lead single from this new LP is also the opener, meaning that “Killing Spree” was meant to be the song to introduce you to Addicted. This being the case, I can’t help but be confused why you’d wish to make your first impression with a disjointed puddle of slop-rock with lyrics just as nauseating as the production. It’s a complete mess of a song that feels ready to fall apart at the seams, all while bemoaning the most horrific of monsters: the youths.

“I blame the mindset,” Malakian says in the press materials for the record, “We now have a generation that is so detached and desensitized. They’re totally unemotional and unempathetic. There’s no respect for life.” This is after he grandstands about issues facing young Gen-Z without addressing the reasons for antisocial tendencies in the kids of today. I do agree that a large amount of contemporary society, young and old alike, is checked out in terms of empathy and totally desensitized, but I think it’s shortsighted and unhelpful to point at a generation of children born to lose and not address the societal and cultural rot leading people to be alienated from each other and themselves. This is especially the case when the anecdote of “…a lady who’s getting beaten up on the subway and people around her aren’t even helping; they’re fucking recording on their iPhones…” reeks of something born of isolated shock videos on the internet. Even if the energy around this single wasn’t off-putting, I can’t exactly see myself being won over by lyrics like “Just like a tiger that’s riding on your back/And it’s singing out Rawr! Rawr!” and “The kids are on a killing spree” being very persuasive.

This issue of out of touch messaging and still ham-fisted prose is evident here in spades beyond “Killing Spree,” as a remarkable amount of lyrical themes contained on this record are surface level and hackneyed. “Satan Hussein” and “Done Me Wrong” are examples of the kinds of pointless political posturing in music that System of a Down served as an oasis from in the Rock Against Bush era of “counter-cultural” music. Much of this substandard commentary can also be seen throughout the strangely off-topic and weirdly demeaning “Watch That Girl” and the annoyingly self-impressed “You Destroy You.”

The record’s lyrical nadir is quite easily “Your Lives Burn,” where Malakian wastes little time throwing out ill-advised tropes about “political division” and “clickbait” with the bold vision of a Joe Rogan Experience guest. Malakian exclaims, “I’m sick of the left and I’m sick of the right/Clickbait causes the cage fights/Political bias has run amok/Cancel me I don’t give a fuck…,” bringing the same level of thought to the table as your centrist uncle who’s taking home the gold for “Most Annoying Guy at Thanksgiving.” These scrawls of vague hogwash come complete with hollow posturing of being a gun-toting badass and “rude crude rabbit.” That same presser shows clarification on these points and, while I can agree that team sport mentalities around capital-worshiping political parties are fucking stupid, a statement like “They want us to focus on bickering about things like guns, trans rights, and abortion, so we don’t look at the shit they’re actually doing to all of us,” is a non-starter and implies that real, tangible issues are mere distractions to some vague problem that is never spoken of. (Assaults on trans and reproductive rights aren’t a part of what “they” are doing to “us?” Didn’t this album just start with a song about how bad school shootings are?!?!).

To take a bit of a zoom out here: if my complaints for this album were merely related to a lyricist who I’ve never been impressed with, I probably would not be 1500 words deep into a word editor (at least I hope not). In addition to messaging that is irritating at best, Addicted To The Violence is seemingly the sound of an artist stuck in time. As stated previously, “Killing Spree” immediately sets the stage for music that is so far out of the zeitgeist that it’s closer to being nostalgic than relevant. Even if the material on here was in season, so to speak, it’s all as on the nose and ill-advised as Malakian’s attempts to satirize Trump and whatever he thinks a “rich woke preacher” is. Much of the record is standard fair for Scars: chugging riffs making up same-y sounding pop-metal compositions that have synths shoehorned in and effects that reek of novelty, now complete with a muddier production job and extraneous elements that make these songs feel like messy piles of half-formed ideas.

Each song has its own silly motif that makes it hard to take seriously: the silly-ass organs in the background of “Done Me Wrong;” the weird ska strumming patterns on “Imposter;” the prog-rock synth runs on “The Shame Game” and the title track, and a vocoder-focused bridge on “Satan Hussein” that sounds like Voivod with a railroad spike driven through its frontal lobe. Each digression feels forced and distracting on songs that vary from alternative music backwash to sterile attempts at thrash-and-bash metal (that, at times, seem like they could be toppled by a light breeze). All this is weakened further by overly compressed instruments fighting to be the most blown/washed-out on a song-by-song basis. Beyond that, there’s really not a whole lot to be said for the music on display here; any compositional techniques on display feel derivative and, like much everything else on here, sloppy. This collection of tracks lacks much of a through-line (beyond the previously mentioned annoying synths that occasionally crop up and some truly uninspired riffs). Scars’ original strength, admittedly decent hooks that are liable to get stuck in your head, is completely gone from Addicted; each song has a disjointed chorus that’s just as remarkable as the verses.

So, here we are, standing before a record that feels ill-advised and almost unfinished, complete with uninspired compositions and lyrics that somehow bring the crass and clumsy lyrical stylings of Scars on Broadway to a new low. I’m not sure if this review has accomplished more than ragging on an album from a band that has been D.O.A. for the last 10 or more years, but Scars seem to be a dying breed of legacy act that refuses to treat their past with any reverence or respect whatsoever. It’s the kind of late career slop that would go unspoken of and expected in the 2010s, records from bands like Godsmack and Staind that would be slated to be shipped straight to the used CD bin if those still existed. I guess the bands that refuse to change from this dated trend will have to settle for the next best thing: negative reviews from pricks like me (a fate worse than death).