Hypnotize

Hypnotize, the fifth album, came out on American Recordings and Columbia on 22 November 2005 as 82796 93871 2. It is the second half of the work begun six months earlier with Mezmerize and came out of the same sessions; the band themselves regard the two as one album released in two parts. Rick Rubin and Daron Malakian produced it, David Schiffman engineered it and Andy Wallace mixed it, and the artwork again uses paintings by Malakian's father, the artist Vartan Malakian. It entered the Billboard 200 at number one with 320,000 copies sold in its first week, giving the band two number-one albums in the same year. The title track, which touches on the Tiananmen Square protests and the effects of propaganda, went to number one on the Modern Rock chart, and "Lonely Day", sung by Malakian, was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 49th Grammy Awards. In Japan it came out on 23 November 2005 in two versions, a standard edition (SICP-935) and a limited first pressing (SICP-933/934) with a DVD carrying the videos for "B.Y.O.B." and "Question!" and a documentary on the making of the two albums; for a limited period both came in a digipak that fits together with Mezmerize's. The band went on hiatus in August 2006 and released no new music until 2020. The running order here is the original's as printed.