Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian, born in Beirut in 1967, made his name as the voice and chief lyricist of System of a Down, a singer who can jump from a croon to a yelp to an operatic swoop inside a single bar. Nobody in heavy music sounds quite like him, and his range is the envy of the genre.

Elect the Dead, his first solo album, came out in 2007, and it proved he did not need his old band's machine-gun riffs to make a racket. He plays keyboards and guitar as well as singing, and the record swings between piano-driven drama and full-tilt metal: "Empty Walls" pounds like a march, "Sky Is Over" is almost a pop song, and "The Unthinking Majority" bristles with nervous energy. Later he took the whole album to an orchestra, recording Elect the Dead Symphony with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. He also founded his own label, Serjical Strike Records.

Activism has never been far from the music. In 2002 he co-founded the political group Axis of Justice with Tom Morello, and in 2011 Armenia's Prime Minister gave him a medal for his work toward recognition of the Armenian genocide.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.