Mezmerize
album by System of a Down
Mezmerize is the fourth studio album by the Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down, released on May 17, 2005, by American Recordings and Columbia Records. Upon its release, the album received acclaim from critics. The album sold over 450,000 copies within the first week, and immediately topped the Billboard 200.
In 2025, Rae Lemeshow-Barooshian of Loudwire included the album in her list of "the top 50 nu-metal albums of all time", ranking it sixteenth.
Background
Mezmerize and Hypnotize are considered two parts of a double album. Mezmerize features guitarist Daron Malakian sharing most of the vocal work with vocalist Serj Tankian, splitting the vocals at least halfway on many of the tracks.
Malakian wrote "Old School Hollywood" after playing in a celebrity baseball game for charity. The song mentions Tony Danza and Frankie Avalon, who also played in the game.
In "Radio/Video", there are lines referring to two people named Danny and Lisa. Malakian commented on the song to Revolver magazine:
"My neighbors were Danny and Lisa, who I sing about in "Radio/Video" with System — they had that record [Paul Stanley's 1978 solo album] and it ended up at my apartment.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mezmerize” is album by System of a Down. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mezmerize, album and System, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q462427. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2025 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mezmerize” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.