“We were like Dime and Vinnie and the Van Halen brothers combined… Then when everything went down, I found out that we were not as close as we thought”: Max Cavalera on Sepultura’s bloody roots, the rise of Soulfly and how metal became the family business
Max Cavalera takes GW back to the beginning in Brazil and the search for a sound more brutal than anyone, the bitter splits and blessed reunions, and what comes next for Soulfly and Cavalera
A proud and devoted family man, Max Cavalera was flying high in mid-September 1994. He, his wife and manager Gloria, and his brother and Sepultura co-founder Igor Cavalera (drums) had just arrived at the Castle Donington festival grounds in Donington, England, where their band was scheduled to play the Monsters of Rock Festival along with Ozzy Osbourne.
Sepultura were supporting their second major label album Roots, which had been released six months earlier and was considered by many to be a strong contender for metal album of the year. Then, disaster struck. While the three Cavaleras were thinking about the upcoming gig, Gloria’s son (Max’s stepson) Dana Wells was killed in a car accident back at their home in Phoenix.
Devastated, the couple flew home on Ozzy’s private jet to bury Wells and grieve. Max had hoped his heart would heal with time, family support, and tons of cathartic, high-volume Sepultura shows. Just four months after Wells died, however, the stability Max had received from his brother and bandmates crumbled like a bombed building.
Following a gig at South London’s Brixton Academy on December 16, 1996, Sepultura told Max they were firing Gloria and hiring a new manager, and Igor sided with his other bandmates instead of his brother. Stricken with rage, Max quit the band and didn’t speak to Igor for 10 years.
“It was a terrible time,” Max recalls from his home office in Phoenix, running his left hand through his scraggly gray beard.
“Since we were kids, we were always so close. Me and him were always planning shit, going to concerts, talking about music. We wanted to take over the world. We should have been closer than ever, and then when everything went down, I found out that we were maybe not as close as we thought we were.”
Though he was riddled with anger and betrayal, Cavalera was determined to persevere. In 1997, he formed Soulfly, which released its self-titled debut a year later and gradually became a formidable presence in the post-2000 metal scene. To date, Soulfly have released 12 albums and are currently writing the follow-up to 2022’s Totem.
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Cavalera enjoyed working on records and touring with Soulfly during much of the band’s first decade, but his joy was clouded by his brothers’ absence. For more than 25 years, he and Igor had been inseparable, and from the early ’80s, when Sepultura took over the Brazilian extreme metal scene to the mid ’90s, when they rose to global success, the chemistry of the Cavaleras was undeniable.
“We were like Dime and Vinnie and the Van Halen brothers combined,” Max says. “Just like Eddie, I had always wanted to play drums, but Igor as already 1,000 miles ahead of me because my father used to take us to soccer games and they would give Igor a snare. He was the team’s mascot. Everybody loved it – this seven-year-old playing the snare. So yeah, he was already better than me and I had to find a different instrument.”
The more years passed since Max’s falling out with Sepultura, the harder it became for the brothers to reconnect.
“It was weird and hard to go through that,” Max says. “Picture being with someone every day of your life and then suddenly not talking to him for 10 years. It was crazy.
“We would only communicate through our mom. I would call her, and she would say, ‘Oh, your brother is doing this and that and says, ‘Hi, hope you’re doing good.’ And I’d tell her the same thing. But me and Igor were both too stubborn to contact one another directly.”
The stalemate came to an end in 2006 when Igor finally lowered his guard, picked up the phone, and called Max. Following a cleansing conversation, Max invited his brother to take the stage to play Sepultura songs at a memorial concert for Wells. The performance was so powerful and inspiring that Max and Igor decided to work together again and Cavalera Conspiracy was born.
By that point, Max was watching his teenage songs, Zyon and Igor Amadeus develop as musicians. Over the years Max’s brother, and two biological sons became inextricably intertwined in the elder Cavalera’s music career.
In all likelihood, the culmination of events happened more by design than fate, says Max, who set the wheels in motion back in 1993 when Gloria was in the hospital about to give birth to Zyon.
“Zyon opens [the 1993 Sepultura album] Chaos A.D. with his heartbeat before he’s born,” Cavalera explains. “I was already thinking, ‘How can I involve my son, who is not even born yet, in my music?’ I was in the hospital with headphones and microphones recording Gloria’s belly, and the doctor's kicking me out: ‘You’ve gotta get out of here! We have to deliver the baby.’ That was the beginning of a plan to involve the family in everything I do.”
Zyon, now 32, joined Soulfly in 2013 and has played drums on four albums. Igor Amadeus, 29, has played live with Soulfly and during the pandemic he and Max formed Go Ahead and Die.
So far, the band has released 2021’s self-titled album and 2023’s Unhealthy Mechanisms. Igor Amadeus also has performed onstage with Cavalera, the rebooted band in which Max and his brother played old Sepultura songs after releasing four full-length Cavalera Conspiracy albums of original material.
In 2023, they redid their logo to resemble Sepultura’s pre-1989 emblem and started re-recording the band’s early catalog. First, they dropped the 1985 EP Bestial Devastation and then 1986’s Morbid Visions. In 2024, they released Sepultura’s second full-length, 1987’s Schizophrenia.
“We’re having such a good time revisiting these songs and making them better,” Max says. “When I think about it now, It’s almost like the rupture between us had to happen to fortify our brotherhood, because now we are more in tune with each other musically, spiritually, everything.”
A few hours before a practice session with Zyon to work on new Sepultura riffs, Cavalera sits down to talk about his introduction to music, the moment he and Igor discovered metal, and the early days of Sepultura. He also recalls touring the world with Gloria and the preschool-aged Zyon and Igor Amadeus in tow, how he has initiated them into his metal world, and what Soulfly fans can expect in the near-future.
![Sepultura - Refuse/Resist [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/6ODNxy3YOPU/maxresdefault.jpg)
Growing up, were you and Igor always bonded through music?
“As little kids, we never really liked music. I liked soccer and going to the beach, and Igor was a year younger than I was, so he did the same kind of stuff. And then, a cousin of ours took us to see Queen in the same stadium that we’d see our local football team play.
“The experience entered every pore of our bodies and that changed everything. The next day, we went downtown and bought a cassette tape of Queen Live Killers. Then we got Kiss Alive II. Suddenly, we wanted to know more about bands.”
How did you discover metal?
“In 1981, when I was 12 and Igor was 11, we lived in Belo Horizonte near all these shady long-hair characters who were wearing Judas Priest shirts, and we went, ‘Yeah, we want to be like those guys!’ We made friends with a couple of them and they had cool record collections.
“That’s where we first saw the Judas Priest live album, Unleashed in the East. I saw the cover and thought, ‘Man, these guys look amazing!’ That’s how we discovered Priest, Iron Maiden and other great metal.”
What about Black Sabbath?
“I discovered Sabbath in a funny way. My dad was a big fan of disco records and Italian opera, which was a really weird combination. After he passed away [when I was nine], I went snooping around through his record collection and I found the first Black Sabbath album. I don’t think he ever liked Black Sabbath. He just bought it out of curiosity, but it was there and that was a gamechanger.”
What was your first guitar?
“My dad had an old acoustic guitar, so I decided to pimp it out like KISS. I broke a mirror and superglued shards from the mirror onto the guitar [to resemble Paul Stanley’s guitar]. I did a horrible job and the shards stuck out and cut my hand. It was total ghetto but it was badass. I wish I still had that.”
![Sepultura - Arise [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/6BOHpjIZyx0/maxresdefault.jpg)
When did you switch to electric?
“It was only after we saw this Brazilian band called Dorso Atlantica, who were real aggressive and kind of sounded like Venom that I turned to Igor and said, ‘Hey, those motherfuckers are from Brazil. If they can do it, we can, too.’ That’s when I bought my first electric guitar.”
What brand?
“There was no brand. I called it ‘Podrido’ which means ‘the rotten’ [in Spanish]. Every time I slid my hand down the neck, a splinter of wood would stick in my finger and I would start bleeding. It was a piece of shit, but it was so cool to have an actual guitar.”
Did you have enough of a foundation from playing the acoustic to be able to form a band?
“It took a couple years. When I bought that guitar, I didn’t know nothing. I came home with it and strummed it and I thought, ‘Nah, I can barely hear it. That’s not the sound I want.’ I took it back to the store and the guy said, ‘Well, you need an amplifier. And if you want to get that Black Sabbath sound, you need a distortion pedal.’ I was like, ‘What? I have to buy all this extra shit?’ I had no clue. I just thought the guitar would have the sound automatically without being plugged in!”
What’s the first song you learned?”
“I was very ambitious. I wanted to learn Heaven and Hell by Black Sabbath, which is quite difficult for a beginner. Smoke on the Water would have been easier. But I was stubborn and determined. I was like, ‘Dammit, I’m going to get this riff.’ Not just did I get the Sabbath riff, but it influenced me to do the riff for the Sepultura song Troops of Doom, which is really similar to Heaven and Hell.’”
Would you say that in the beginning, your ambition outweighed your talent?
“We started in 1984 before we knew anything about being in a band. Right before that, I would spend hours translating lyrics from metal records. One of them was Dancing on Your Grave from Another Perfect Day by Motörhead. The translation of ‘grave’ was ‘sepultura.’ I liked that, so I circled the word in the dictionary and I showed it to Igor.
“We had the name and we started messing around with the logo, but we didn’t really know how to play. And for a long time, Igor didn’t have a drum kit. He used to have a snare from school band and he had a floor tom, which he used as a bass drum. And then we had a broom with one cymbal attached that was mounted in a bucket full of cement. That’s all we had to play with at first.”
In mid 1985, you went into J.G. Estudios and recorded five primitive songs for a split-EP with Overdose called Bestial Devastation. Why did you and Igor go back into the studio in 2022 to re-record and release that EP as well as your first full-length Morbid Visions?
“We thought they should be heard the right way. When we did the first stuff with Sepultura, I didn’t know nothing about recording. A friend of mind said, ‘You know you got to tune the guitar, right?’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I fucked it up! I went to the studio and the engineer didn’t know what the fuck he was doing so I recorded the songs out of tune, which is pretty fucking cool, if you’re asking me.
“And the same for Morbid Visions. That’s why the black metal guys like it so much. It had that necro sound by accident. There’s a charm in those records, but they don’t sound technically good and we were real curious what it would sound like if we redid them playing real good, in tune, with a real producer. So, we worked with Arthur Rizk and I think the songs came out great.
“For anyone who loves those early records, they’re always going to be out there. But the new recordings are what we originally envisioned and wanted to hear, but we were so limited back then. We had three days to do the first EP and one week to do the whole Morbid Visions album.”
You followed those re-recordings up in 2024 with a remake of Schizophrenia, which was originally released in 1987 and featured songs that were more rooted in extreme thrash.
The gateway drug to being fast and extreme was Motörhead. Once we heard them, we said, ‘Yeah, this is what we like. Now, let’s do something even crazier’
“We wanted to get heavier and heavier. And I think the gateway drug to being fast and extreme was Motörhead. Once we heard them, we said, ‘Yeah, this is what we like. Now, let’s do something even crazier.’ We were being influenced by everything brutal: Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer, Bulldozer, and of course all the big German thrash bands, Kreator, Destruction, and Sodom.
“And we loved the US stuff like Voivod, Metallica, and Slayer – their 1984 EP Haunting the Chapel was so huge for us. We bought it and took it home and put it on a turntable. We didn’t know you had to change the speed of the turntable to 45, so we played it at 33 rpm and it sounded brutal and grinding, and the vocal were low and all death metal.
“We went, ‘Yeah, this is cool!’ Then one of our friends said, ‘Hold on, you guys. You are playing it wrong.’ He put it on the right speed and it was even better! But if you have a turntable, you should put Haunting the Chapel on and listen to it at 33 just to hear how cool it sounds like that.”
The way you and Igor discovered metal and formed a band created a tight family network from the beginning of your journey into music that’s carried through your life. Were your parents part of that bond?
We got kicked out of Catholic school. We got kicked out of military school. All we wanted to do was music
“Unfortunately, my dad was dead, but my mom always wanted what was good for us in life. She tried to keep us in school and studying, but we were not having none of that.
“We got kicked out of Catholic school. We got kicked out of military school. All we wanted to do was music, even when we had no money. We said, ‘This is our path. We’re going to go for it.’ It was a make-or-break type deal and my mom helped us out on that journey.”
How so?
“Our house became the headquarters for metalheads in Belo Horizonte. There were about 20 of us and my mom would cook for us and let my friends stay over. There were some nights when 15 people would sleep at my house because my mom decided she would rather have our friends come over and stay with us rather than have us all going out and getting crazy. Of course, that happened later.”
Did you and Igor party like rock stars before you were rock stars?
“I did. It’s funny because I was older, but I was the shithead brother. I did all the drugs and drinking. I gave zero fucks about everything. I was angry and out of control, and Igor was straight edge for most of his life.
“I was like, ‘Why don’t you party?’ And he told me, ‘Man, I have to be straight so I can look out for your ass. Otherwise, we’d both end up dead.’ When I finally started going out with Gloria in [1990], Igor thanked her. He said, ‘Oh, now you can look after him because I’m tired of doing it myself.’”
You were signed by Roadrunner and recorded the groundbreaking Beneath the Remains in 1989 with producer Scott Burns, who went on to be an icon of the Florida death metal sound. That album and its follow up, 1991’s Arise earned you a loyal following in the U.S. and Europe. Were you and Igor on top of the world or was all that attention overwhelming?
“We loved it. We discovered the world outside Brazil together and played lots of great shows. Everything we had worked for when we were 12 years old was happening. We always wanted to be able to make a living from music. That’s all we wanted so we were living our dream.”
![Sepultura - Desperate Cry [Under Siege Live In Barcelona 1991] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/iQ1rfAcSn3k/maxresdefault.jpg)
Your sons Zyon and Igor Amadeus were born in 1993 and 1995, respectively. At the time of Igor’s birth, you were still in Sepultura. You and Gloria raised them largely on the road. Was that your way of grooming them into becoming musicians?
“When they were born, I could have hid them from the rest of the world. Lots of musicians do that. But instead, I wanted to tell everyone in the metal community, ‘Listen, you can be a dad and still be a badass!’ I think it makes you even more of a badass. So, that was part of the planning – to involve the family in everything I do.
“They met everyone on tour – Ozzy, James Hetfield, Tony Iommi – the list is huge. There’s an awesome picture of all of the four Ramones guys holding Zyon as a baby and he’s screaming his head off. He hated the whole thing, but he grew to love it. There’s another where the two kids are sleeping on a Black Sabbath guitar case while Black Sabbath was playing and I was jamming to Iron Man. That was such a trip.”
Did being on the road with Soulfly pique their interest in being musicians?
I think I wanted to forgive him because it was so hard to be apart for so long. The first thing he said was, ‘I don't give a f**k about anything else. I just want to be your brother again’
“They have music in their genes and their blood so they almost couldn’t help it. But I wasn’t going to force them into anything. My wish was always, ‘Yeah, I hope one day they are good enough so we can play together and I can pass this thing on.’ And I’m extremely lucky that it worked out and I get to play with them in different bands and teach them about being in music.
“And it’s not just them who have gotten an education. I learn from them as well. They’ve introduced me to cool bands I didn’t know. And they have their own musical ideas that we explore, which is so great.”
A major moment for you came when your brother Igor called you after 10 years of silence and the two of you reconciled your differences. Was it hard to forgive him considering the way he sided with your ex-bandmates in Sepultura and stayed with them until 2006?
“I think I wanted to forgive him because it was so hard to be apart for so long. The first thing he said was, ‘I don't give a fuck about anything else. I just want to be your brother again. And I want to know your family and I want you to get to know my family.’ I was the one that convinced him we should play music together again. I didn’t even care if it was good or not or what format it was. And that turned into Cavalera Conspiracy.”
You recorded Inflikted together in 2007. Did it feel natural to be playing together again or was there a learning curve?
“It was the greatest, most natural thing, and it was an amazing feeling to be playing with him. I had written a bunch of riffs for the next Soulfly record, but I just took them to Cavalera Conspiracy. I said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll write Soulfly riffs another time.’ And they came out the way they did – more like thrashy Sepultura, maybe – but that’s just what comes from Igor and I playing together. We had Joe Duplantier from Gojira on bass and it was fun to do those songs.”
By 2017, Cavalera Conspiracy had released four albums of original material.
“It was cool and fun, but it became a lot more fun when we started playing the old stuff. That started with the [Max and Iggor Cavalera] Return to Roots tour [in 2016], where we played the whole Roots record. That was huge for us and led us to continue doing more Sepultura stuff, [and Iggor kept spelling his name with two “G”s].
“It actually was not my idea to redo our old stuff. It was Gloria’s idea. She said, ‘You guys should go re-record your first records because you sound so good playing those songs live now, and those records never sounded as good as they should have.’”
You recently played Schizophrenia and Arise with your brother and son Igor Amadeus, and on August 20 you’re playing Chaos A.D. at a big festival in Hershey, Pennsylvania, opening for Slayer. Does performing those songs onstage bring back memories of the glory days of Sepultura?
Everything comes back – all the feelings from our teenage years forming the band, all the emotions from when we were just getting out there and making a name for ourselves
“Oh, definitely. Everything comes back – all the feelings from our teenage years forming the band, all the emotions from when we were just getting out there and making a name for ourselves – all the nostalgia and the crazy stories. And I get goosebumps when I’m onstage and I turn my head, and there’s my son [Igor Amadeus] right there playing bass and he’s raging. He’s going off.
“And we also get to make music together in the band Go Ahead and Die. Whenever we play, I keep saying to myself, ‘You’re so lucky to able to do this. Just enjoy it, man.’”
Zyon joined Soulfly in 2013 and is working on his fifth album with the band.
“Zyon has turned into a really engaging drummer. He is playing his ass off and it's so cool to see because when he first joined Soulfly, he wasn't this maniac about drumming that he is now. It was a bit of a struggle to get him excited for the project, but now we both love it and it’s incredible to see how he can play and what he comes up with.”
How will the next Soulfly record compare to your other albums?
“I’m working on collecting the riffs now. I always say the riffs are in the desert and I’ve got to go hunting through the sand to find them. So far, it feels like it’s going to be a really different record for Soulfly and I think it’s going to hit harder than any of the other ones.”
Has all the violence and turmoil in the world inspired the heavy direction of the songs?
I want the record to be a tribute to my mom. She was a huge figure in my life, so she has influenced a lot of the spiritual side of it
“The world has gone crazy, and that’s part of it. But also, I want the record to be a tribute to my mom. She was a huge figure in my life, so she has influenced a lot of the spiritual side of it. I realized that I do my best work when I speak from my heart and have really personal lyrics. It feels like an inspirational record. It’s our thirteenth album so that’s kind of superstitious right there. But I’m very driven to create something solid and meaningful.”
This will be the first Soulfly album to feature guitarist Mike DeLeon.
“I like Mike’s solos a lot and he’s a madman live. I’d like to have both of us playing rhythms on the album because that’s how we play live and he’s really good at the triplets and all the palm-muted stuff. So, we’ll see about that but the leads will be all him.”
What’s the ETA for the album?
“It’s a big priority for me right now but we’re not rushing anything. Whenever the riffs are there and the songs feel right, we’ll record the album. We’ll probably even book a studio to work on it.”
- Schizophrenia is out now via Nuclear Blast.
Jon is an author, journalist, and podcaster who recently wrote and hosted the first 12-episode season of the acclaimed Backstaged: The Devil in Metal, an exclusive from Diversion Podcasts/iHeart. He is also the primary author of the popular Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal and the sole author of Raising Hell: Backstage Tales From the Lives of Metal Legends. In addition, he co-wrote I'm the Man: The Story of That Guy From Anthrax (with Scott Ian), Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen (with Al Jourgensen), and My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grit, Guts & Glory (with Roger Miret). Wiederhorn has worked on staff as an associate editor for Rolling Stone, Executive Editor of Guitar Magazine, and senior writer for MTV News. His work has also appeared in Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Yahoo.com, Revolver, Inked, Loudwire.com and other publications and websites.
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