Listen: Members of System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine, and Avenged Sevenfold Cover Radiohead

Last January, System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan said that the debut album from his project These Grey Men would be released “within the next four months,” but as you can probably guess, that didn’t happen. What was the hold up? No idea. Dolmayan raised $55,000 via a crowd-funding campaign waaaayyy back in 2014. If I had contributed to that campaign, I’d be pretty pissed by now.

But now These Grey Men are really finally for actually really real releasing an eponymous album, which will drop on February 24. The eight-track (not 8-track) release will consist entirely of covers of various artists, not a one of which is metal (selections include songs by Madonna, David Bowie, Eminem, and Talking Heads). One of these covers — of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” from 1995’s The Bends — has now been released a single, and is available for your listening/viewing pleasure via the below music video. The track features Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows on vocals and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello on guitar.

As you might expect, given both the song’s lineage and the participants in its re-recording, it’s pretty good. It’s not vastly different from the original, although they do bring the drums in earlier, and they’ve added an orchestral bit, which is pretty neat. The most disappointing aspect is actually Morello — while he does get to some of his patented sci-fi shredding, he doesn’t get a true-blue guitar solo (most of his stuff happens underneath Shadows’ vocals). So it’s like, why even have Tom Morello on the song? You might as well have had Shadows play the triangle instead of sing while you’re at it.

Meanwhile, two of the covers on the These Grey Men album — Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and David Bowie’s “Starman” — both feature vocals by Serj Tankian. So that’s probably the closest thing we’ll get to new SOAD music for awhile.

[via The PRP]