In early January 2011, System of a Down leader SERJ TANKIAN heard reports of mass bird and fish deaths around the world.

It was then, he says in a press release, that he started writing Harakiri, the brand-new solo album he'll release July 10.

"The omen was not lost on me," Tankian says. "Varied creatures on earth were committing massive hara-kiri (the Japanese term signifying ritualistic suicide.)

Do they know something we don't about the coming times or the sustainability of the environment?"

The Lebanese-born singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist recorded this, his third solo effort, at his home studio in Los Angeles, and on three of the tracks, he worked from song sketches he composed on his iPad.

"We must trick ourselves into writing in different ways to get unexpected results," he says.

Rather than simply release the tracklist, Tankian worked the song titles into the self-penned album description pasted below. Track names are bolded.

The Cornucopia of love/hate affairs with Gaia have made us scream "Figure It Out! CEOs are the disease."

Where abusive capitalism's only fate is human/environmental devastation. The Ching Chime, diminutive drama of a gangsta Butterfly revealed that humanity's tears actually outweigh yearly rainfall on the planet.

We have witnessed Harakiri on a grand scale tearing out the Occupied Tears of victims preyed on by victims turned aggressors creating a Deafening Silence through which we hear a voice plead, "Forget Me Knot, my child."

Reality TV has become the searing indictment of a society best described as the Uneducated Democracy.

The daughters of the evolution Weave On with blood dripping down their guilty hands onto the flag as the word republic is replaced by empire.