System of a Down will play the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Saturday 5 June 2027, a few miles from Los Angeles, the city where the band formed. It will be their first show at the stadium and their only North American date of 2027. Pierce the Veil complete the bill as special guests.
The announcement was made on social media on Monday 19 October, although clues had been appearing around the city all weekend. A rose, the central image on the poster, was projected onto buildings across the Los Angeles area, into the sky and onto the side of the Rose Bowl itself. The campaign coincided with the week-long exhibition the band held at the Beyond the Streets gallery to mark 25 years of ‘Toxicity’, the 2001 album that includes ‘Chop Suey!’ and ‘Aerials’.
Registration for the artist presale is open on the band’s official website until Wednesday 21 October at 9pm Pacific time, which is 5am on Thursday in the UK. The presale begins on Friday 23 October at 10am Pacific time, 6pm UK time, and includes VIP packages. General sale opens on Monday 26 October at 10am Pacific time through Ticketmaster; with the clocks going back that weekend, that will be 5pm in the UK.
The Pasadena show will close the first half of a 2027 that begins a long way from home. On 15 January the band play the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, before heading to Australia and New Zealand for four stadium dates with Faith No More, who will be playing their first shows since 2016: Accor Stadium in Sydney on 22 January, Marvel Stadium in Melbourne on the 27th, Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane on 1 February and Hnry Stadium in Wellington on the 7th.
Not long ago, a schedule like this would have seemed unthinkable. System of a Down haven’t released an album since 2005’s ‘Hypnotize’, and since then they have put out just two new songs, ‘Protect the Land’ and ‘Genocidal Humanoidz’, both in 2020. Even so, the scale of their shows has kept growing. In 2024 they shared a bill with Deftones in San Francisco‘s Golden Gate Park; in 2025 they toured US stadiums with Korn, Deftones and Avenged Sevenfold; and this summer they returned to Europe for the first time since 2017. That tour opened on 29 June in Stockholm, took in the Stade de France and London‘s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and finished on 18 July in Warsaw, with Queens of the Stone Age and Acid Bath as guests and sold-out shows in Paris, London and Warsaw. A year ago, Serj Tankian told Kerrang! that the crowd response had been “insane” for a band that, in his words, had “disappeared for so many years”.
Pierce the Veil arrive on the bill at one of the high points of their career. The San Diego trio of Vic Fuentes, Tony Perry and Jaime Preciado have spent nearly two decades building an international following and have passed 2 billion streams with a blend of post-hardcore, emo, punk and pop. Their I Can’t Hear You world tour sold out Madison Square Garden, Red Rocks and several nights at the Kia Forum, and this year they announced their first stadium headline show, at Petco Park in their home city, scheduled for 12 September. Their most recent album is 2023’s ‘The Jaws of Life’.
System of a Down still have one more show in 2026: on Saturday 24 October they headline the Sick New World festival at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, Texas.
