Cavalera is a name with its fingerprints all over the history of heavy metal, an inspiring family legacy built upon decades of musical aggression, starting all the way back in 1984 in Brazil with Sepultura.
Over the last couple of years, Max and Iggor Cavalera revisited their first three releases, Morbid Visions, Bestial Devastation, and Schizophrenia, re-recording them with a new level of intensity that impossibly captures the raw, youthful and trademark sounds of these iconic and pioneering releases.
January 2025 will see them bring the songs that laid the groundwork for not just their own legacy, but that of both the death and thrash metal genres, to Australia for a series of live offerings that will add yet another chapter to their non-stop commitment to extreme metal and this week Max sat down with Rue Morgue Records to chat all about it.
“We are super excited, man. This is a great way to start the year,” says Max when we start to talk about the Australian tour. “I can’t think of a better way to kick in the New Year. I do a lot of Cameos and I am surprised just how many of them come from Australia. I know I have a lot of fans there and even going right back to the Sepultura days it has always been amazing.”
That leads to Max and I talking a lot about those early Sepultura tours to Australia and then bringing it forward to the amazing Soulfly and Cavalera Conspiracy shows that we have seen in more recent times.
“This is something different though… this is something special,” Max says with his tone becoming more heartfelt. “This is the roots, no pun intended, of Max and Iggor Cavalera… this is it. These are the three records that made us the way we are today. This is the beginning of the journey and the tour is great because it is so nostalgic. This is like getting in a time machine and going back to 1985. We even have the bullet vests, the spikes – we go full on nostalgic with this one. And the songs themselves are just completely brutal… so it is going to be great.”
Moving away from the actual shows I ask Max what it was like going back and re-visiting those original three albums.
“It brought back some memories,” he says with a laugh. “But it wasn’t just that. I mean we did shows for Roots but this was actually going back and re-recording and when you do that everything becomes more focussed.”
“I love that people love the re-recordings,” he says continuing. “I was even surprised by the reaction – it was better than I expected. I mean I thought that there were going to be some hardcore fans who love the original and they really don’t care that you have done a re-recording… they don’t even want to know about it. But it wasn’t like that at all – everybody was so open minded and when they heard what we did they could tell that it was actually an improvement on the original.”
“That is what I like to think about,” he explains. “It is like if you have an old car in your garage and it doesn’t have a motor in it. We just came in and we brought in a mechanic and we put a brand new motor in it. It’s an old car but now it runs great. That’s really what we did – we didn’t change the songwriting or anything like that – the songs are exactly the same – we just gave them a treatment to make them sound more bad ass.”
With the passion in Max’s voice very obvious as we chat about some of the first tracks he had ever written I ask how it has felt now being able to take these tracks from those old studios in Brazil onto stages right around the world.
“It does take us right back,” he agrees. “It is almost like a ritual as we get ready for the show – we are both sitting in the dressing room and putting our spikes on and we are putting our bullet belts on. And it feels different because that kind of stuff doesn’t happen with Soulfly or my other bands… because we don’t use that kind of stuff. Just by doing that it feels like we go back in time and we are creating a whole new dimension for the whole thing.”
“And then when you think of the songs themselves it is very, very brutal and fast,” he says. “It is a real tour de force… it is sheer brutality. The show is just an hour and a half of pure pummelling energy – these are all speed tracks and I love that because it means that it is all about the energy. I am just happy that I am physically able to do it and Iggor is playing great right now – he is playing the drums with an incredible amount of power.”
So what does the rest of 2025 have in store for Max?
“A lot of touring,” he says again laughing. “And also there will be a new Soulfly album which I am working on right now. It is our thirteenth album with is all very superstitious. But I am very excited about it because we haven’t done anything for a while.
“But yes a lot of touring,” he continues. “Cavalera will be in the US and of course Australia and I will also be bringing Nailbomb to Europe for some festivals as well. It is going to be a very busy year and I love that we will be starting in Australia.”
Cavalera’s Australian tour kicks off this Friday.
By David Griffiths
