System Of A Down have reached a huge landmark with their ‘Chop Suey!‘ music video reaching one billion views.

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‘Chop Suey!’ was the breakthrough lead single from the band’s best-selling second album, ‘Toxicity’ (2001). Despite being released nearly 20 years ago, the music video wasn’t uploaded to YouTube until 2009.

The Marcos Siega-directed music video is memorable for its use of the Snorricam technique and perspective effect editing to make it appear like the bandmembers, who are playing to a crowd in an LA hotel parking lot, ‘walk through’ each other.

‘Chop Suey!’, which was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 2002 Grammy awards, has become the cult band’s signature song, with the Billlboard 200-topping ‘Toxicity’ breaking them through into the mainstream (the album is now certified triple platinum by the RIAA).

Guitarist, songwriter and second vocalist of the band, Daron Malakian, reflected on the song’s success in an interview with Loudwire back in 2018.

“I remember when I wrote ‘Chop Suey!’ we didn’t even have a tour bus yet,” Malakian told the publication. “We were still in an RV and I was playing my acoustic guitar in back of the RV where there was a bed. I never write on the road. That’s one of the few, very few songs that I wrote while I was on the road, I remember writing the song when the RV was on the highway. I don’t know where we were, probably [driving] to the next gig, and it all came to me just hanging out in the back of the RV playing my acoustic guitar.”

Malakian continued: “I can always feel when I write something good and I can always tell when I write something that needs a little work. I thought it was really good, but did I think it was going to turn into this huge song that was gonna get on MTV and become a huge hit for System of a Down? No. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that it was gonna be our first [hit] single. I didn’t think it was gonna be so huge, but at the time I thought it was good. I was a fan of it.”

Meanwhile, the musician recently stated that he doesn’t expect any more System Of A Down music to emerge in the near future after the band reunited earlier this month.

SOAD released ‘Protect The Land’ and ‘Genocidal Humanoidz’, their first new material in 15 years, to raise money for the Armenia Fund following the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Artsakh.