Toxicity Review

Rick Rubin's job here is to get out of the way without letting the band collapse, and he does it: guitars thick and dry, Serj Tankian's voice placed right at the front, room for a sitar and a banjo without any of it sounding like a novelty. What the band does with that room is the argument. Chop Suey moves through four unrelated sections in three minutes, Aerials ends the album on something close to a hymn, and the title track packs prison policy and a city's indifference into three and a half minutes of riffing.

Tankian and Daron Malakian write about incarceration, deforestation and national paranoia in a register nearer to cabaret than to metal, and the whiplash between a scream and a playground melody is the design rather than a defect. Critics were broadly positive and the record remains the band's consensus peak, with the standing reservation that the tonal switching gets exhausting across fourteen tracks and that several of the shorter songs are sketches wearing a full arrangement.

The politics are angrier than they are specific, and a listener looking for an actual position will not find one. The playing is exceptional throughout, the hooks are strange and unreasonably durable, and no other band of that moment sounds remotely like this one.