Their second album, released in 2001 and produced by Rick Rubin at Cello Studios in Hollywood. It was the record that took System of a Down from the underground to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and it got there the week of the September 11 attacks, which gave its arrival a strange and heavy frame. The singles carried it: Chop Suey!, the title track, and Aerials, each one a different face of the same band. Thrash one moment, melody the next, folk inflection threaded through where you least expect it. It went multi-platinum and it still reads as a landmark of early-2000s metal, the album where the band’s friction finally found a mass audience without softening to get there. If you only know them from one record, it is almost certainly this one. Start with Chop Suey!, then let the rest of it argue with you.