Relentless - 30 Years of Sepultura
1996 was a good year for Sepultura.
Or was it?
The popularity of heavy music comes in waves, and when it’s not “cool” to like this visceral, aggressive style of music, it goes largely underground. Many devotees would argue that this is where it belongs. In the early 80s, for example, bands like Metallica and Slayer weren’t even a blip on the mainstream radar. These long haired, pissed off teenagers recruited their fans one by bloody one, inciting violent mosh pits in the smallest, most decrepit venues, and trading tapes with kids all over the world who hungered for something more real than the shit MTV passed off as “metal” at the time.
In the first half of the 90s, the grunge movement invaded the music scene, spawning an army of clones dressed in flannel. By 1996, depression was cool. Doc Marten boots were cool.
Metal was not cool.
But a few bands had broken out and risen into a sort of “mainstream” of metal.
Metallica was, of course, the first, leading the way for the other three of the Big Four; Megadeth, and to a lesser extent, Anthrax and Slayer. Pantera did it too, and without compromising an ounce of brutality in their music.
February of ’96 saw the release of Sepultura’s groundbreaking Roots, an album that heavily integrated the music and rhythms of the band’s native Brazil. Their sound had evolved through black metal and death metal and straight-razor thrash of earlier material into something slower and sludgier, down-tuned, with a groove that made your hips swing as much as your head bang. On Roots they collaborated with such stars as Brazilian percussionist Carlinhos Brown, Korn’s Jonathan Davis, and Mike Patton of Faith No More. Even the Xavante indian tribe from northern Brazil made appearances.
The album debuted at number twenty-seven on the Billboard charts in the US, an incredible feat for such a band in those days, and went on to sell over 2 million copies internationally. It topped “Best of the Year” charts around the world. It received rave reviews from The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, two of the influential
newspapers in the United States. The innovative mix of metal and Brazilian rhythms prompted MTV (at a time when the M in the channel’s name still stood for Music) to consider them “perhaps the most important heavy metal band of the 90s.”
Not bad for a group of Brazilian youngsters who—though forming in 1984—hadn’t even played a show outside of their own country until 1989.
Sepultura toured relentlessly throughout the US, returned to South America for a triumphant series of hometown dates, played massive stadium gigs at festivals all over Europe, even soldiered through a set at Castle Donington in the United Kingdom as a three-piece after vocalist and co-founder Max Cavalera was forced home to Phoenix for the funeral of his stepson.
They were no longer solely a Brazilian phenomenon, but a worldwide phenomenon, having brought a slice of their homeland to almost every corner of the globe.
Yet, while everything seemed fine from the outsider’s point of view, 1996 on the whole was the most miserable year of the band’s storied career. And ten short months after the release of Roots, at the absolute peak of their popularity—and to everyone’s surprise—Max left the band he had founded with his brother twelve years prior.
Suddenly, there was a very real possibility that Sepultura’s career was finished, just as they were on the verge of breaking through to an unbelievable level of success.