Roots, the 1996 album by the Brazilian band Sepultura, turns 30. Fusing metal with Brazil’s tribal roots could be an exciting journey in itself; but it becomes far more so if we backbone it through a personal trip that takes us from 1990s Coruña to the Mato Grosso jungle and back again.
In the Coruña of 1996, the connection with Brazil was almost a genetic matter. Language similarities with Portuguese aside, if you played a “World Cup” in the schoolyard, you chose to be Brazil. Everyone knows this; it’s an immutable law. Beyond that, I’m talking about something deeper: a sort of Atlantic brotherhood that made us look across the ocean with a strange familiarity, perhaps fed by the echoes of emigration and sea salt. I suppose it was mostly about football, but in this particular case, we didn’t find samba or sun in Brazil; instead, some of us found a percussive meat grinder, guitars tuned to the basement, and tribal paint.
In 1997, at thirteen, you don’t really care about purism, or labels, or whether thrash metal is “selling out” to the new rhythms of nü metal. As a teenager, I was in exploratory mode, innocently free of prejudice, jumping between the alternative rock of the era and the classics provided by the occasional older brother or father, with a not-yet-defined restlessness to find something that went further. I needed something more extreme, an adrenaline rush that would break with the status quo, but I didn’t know it yet.
The scene was this: we’re going to dinner with my parents and some of their friends. Their son has some promotional CDs from Metal Hammer magazine; the disc in question was called Killing Cuts. Since dinner looks like it’s going to be delayed, we hop into the car to listen to those discs, which were a true hodgepodge: impossible compilations, previews, rarities… and it included, among other things, answering machine messages from various bands. In one of them, you could hear a certain Max Cavalera, leader of the Brazilians Sepultura, with tribal rhythms in the background. They were drums that seemed to come from an imagined jungle. I suppose this was that extreme movement I was looking for. I couldn’t explain it then, but I understood that something was happening there and that it wasn’t just noise. There was a blend that called to me: extreme metal and tribal percussion, brutality and roots, distortion and damp earth.
I only knew Sepultura by name from magazines like Kerrang! or the aforementioned Metal Hammer. I vaguely associated it with something extreme, probably too much so, like death metal. I came (like almost everyone) from a metal initiation via Metallica, and anything tougher than that was uncharted territory for me. But Sepultura was different. It was an aesthetic and conceptual attraction. A Brazilian band conquering the world with imagery of Amazonian tribes and war paint? The head of a kid with a penchant for metal is usually prone to obsession—it generates an unparalleled sense of belonging—but that was the ultimate mind-blow.
It’s curious: Roots was the album where Sepultura left behind the most orthodox thrash and death to venture into “groovier,” more tribal territories—what would later be labeled as nü metal. Many fans recoiled. They came from the technical fury of Beneath the Remains, the muscle of Arise, the impact of Chaos A.D. And suddenly, this sounded different. Heavier. More rhythmic. Less speed, more earth. But I arrived there without prior baggage. There was nothing to betray. I had no purity to defend. I only had hunger.
I obtained, through a providential loan, the double CD The Roots of Sepultura. On one side, the full Roots (1996) album; on the other, a grab bag of covers, demos, their Barcelona live set, and tracks from their more “brutal” era. That purist part didn’t click with me as much back then. I was looking for the jungle and the groove. Unfortunately, the great technological tragedy of the era appeared: the duration of the blank cassette. The whole album wouldn’t fit. That precariousness forced me to act as a makeshift editor, trimming the masterpiece so it would fit into the 60 minutes of a random blank tape. It was that mutilated, hand-selected version that became my personal bible; in fact, I didn’t manage to own the full album again until some time later.
Banknote featuring the iconic indigenous figure that starred on the cover of Roots
Roots (1996): 30th Anniversary
Roots is a mammoth album in many respects. 72 massive minutes of tectonic earthquake that mostly transition between groove metal and an incipient nü metal that makes a shy appearance. To understand the record, we must mention a figure like Ross Robinson; the “pope” of the genre at the time provided a production sound that was raw, dirty, organic, and punchy, with incredibly low string tuning (a trend that later became the norm), added to percussions that perfectly married Igor Cavalera’s groove on drums with a multitude of contributions in the form of berimbaus, timbales, and even propane tanks.
The start grabs you by the throat and crushes you without hesitation. “Roots Bloody Roots” became an iconic riff, chorus, and opening. Setting the tone with a war cry rather than a song. Here, Max already leans into a half-rapped phrasing.
“Attitude” is, possibly, one of the best songs on the album. It opens with an intro based on a berimbau rhythm that progressively immerses us in a track as complex as it is crushing.
“Cut-Throat” is a track that could have been on their previous Chaos A.D. Rhythmic and full of spite.
“Rattamahatta” is one of the album’s controversial points. The most improbable single of the decade: a collaboration with percussionist Carlinhos Brown where metal fused with batucada in a way so savage it was scary.
“Breed Apart”, “Straighthate”, and “Spit” form a more “straight-ahead” section of the record, although the broken rhythms and strange guitar textures make them songs that go far beyond filler or transition.
In “Lookaway”, we have another polarizing moment. An industrial nightmare featuring Jonathan Davis (Korn), Mike Patton (Faith No More), and DJ Lethal (Limp Bizkit). It’s a slow, hypnotic, and disturbing track. Patton makes out-of-this-world noises and the atmosphere is so thick you could cut it with a knife. It’s the most “trippy” moment on the album.
“Dusted” and “Born Stubborn” are perfect, groovier, and in their own way have arguably aged the best. In fact, given the “grand finale” tone, they could have closed the album and it would have been fine.
But no, we enter the final act zone with “Jasco” and “Itsári”, recorded with the Xavante tribe in the Mato Grosso (which we’ll talk about later). Sepultura playing acoustic guitars alongside the tribe’s chants. This could have remained a mere “posturing” gesture, but it is the spiritual heart of the album. Breathtaking.
“Ambush” and “Endangered Species” return us to activism via pure, agonizing heaviness accompanied by jungle percussion. The end perfectly summarizes the album’s essence: a minute-and-a-half hardcore punk blast in “Dictatorshit” and a 13-minute jam of sounds recorded in a canyon. Echoes, stones, strange noises… a little bit of chill after the apocalypse.
The Tribal (and Feverish) Dream of Max Cavalera
Roots is not a concept album; it hovers over many social themes, but it’s generally put in this bucket because of its aesthetic line and the tracks recorded live in the heart of the Amazon. The story of how they ended up recording with the Xavante tribe in the Mato Grosso is the peak of my obsession with this record. Hang on:
It all started because Max Cavalera had a dream in which he literally recorded with indigenous Brazilians. He could have thought, “what a weird dream,” and gone back to his coffee, but instead, he called Brazil’s indigenous affairs office (FUNAI) and told them something like: “Hi, we’re a metal band from the country and we want to record with a tribe.” FUNAI’s response was, logically: “You’re crazy.”
After a hell of paperwork and bureaucracy, the Xavante (a tribe known for their warrior spirit and historical resistance) agreed to receive them. But there were conditions: no massive invasive technology, absolute respect for their rituals, and they had to travel in a rickety bush plane carrying only the essentials.
This led to the surreal image of four guys with long hair, tattoos, and extreme band t-shirts stepping off a plane in the middle of the Mato Grosso. The natives, obviously, looked at them as if they were aliens. To be accepted, the band members had to integrate by painting their bodies with urucú (a natural red dye), eating their food, and sleeping in their huts.
The most curious thing was when the Xavante asked them what they did, so Max played them a Sepultura cassette. The indigenous people, far from being frightened, were blown away by the energy. They saw in metal a form of “war cry” similar to their own rituals. There was an instant “tribe to tribe” connection, so finally the collaboration took shape, and they recorded outdoors, under stifling heat, with portable eight-track recorders. No metronome, no click track, simply guided by the pulse of the earth, letting themselves be carried away by the tribe’s chants while the band followed them with their acoustic instruments. In fact, in “Itsári”, it’s a single take—no smoke or mirrors.
When Sepultura left, they gave the guitars and some instruments to the Xavante. Years later, some tribe members remembered the visit as the day “the men with long hair came to sing with us.” Ross Robinson says that experience changed the energy of the rest of the album. After being in the jungle with the Xavante, they couldn’t go back to the studio and record something “normal.” They had to record something that sounded like survival and communion.
Awakening from the Dream
There are symbols that condense eras. For me, one of them was a birthday gift: a Brazilian national team jersey, green and yellow, with the crest transformed into an S made of bones and thorns—the Sepultura logo—and the number 10 on the back with the band’s name. That shirt wasn’t just merchandise. It was a statement of adolescent identity. It was saying: I am here. I belong to this. I’m obsessed. What I didn’t know was that, besides being obsessed, I was being a jinx.
Shortly after, Max Cavalera would leave the group following internal tensions with Andreas Kisser (guitar), disagreements between the band and their manager, and personal tragedies. Cavalera would found Soulfly, where he would continue exploring that mix of groove and tribalism. Sepultura would continue with Derrick Green, initiating a new era. My identity epiphany ended abruptly at its peak.
However, before the great silence, fate gave me one last dance in 1998. It was on the “Diabolus on Tour”, where Sepultura came with Slayer. In my youthful ignorance, I was outraged: “How was it possible that Sepultura weren’t the headliners?” I still hadn’t processed the magnitude of Slayer’s legend, let alone knew who a certain System of a Down were, opening the night as beardless newcomers just starting to poke their heads out.
We saw the new Sepultura with Derrick Green. And although Max was missing, my Brazil shirt and I bounced like absolute pigs in a puddle when “Roots Bloody Roots” and all the classics played. It was a necessary exorcism before the hiatus arrived—that great void in which many of us disconnected from both sides, lost between the uneven releases of Soulfly and a Sepultura searching for its new skin. More than twenty years had to pass for the wound to heal. It was at a Download Festival, back in 2019, when I reunited with Max Cavalera at the helm of Soulfly. It was like joining the missing piece of the puzzle.
Over time, I understood that Roots was a pivotal album. It decisively influenced the subsequent rise of metal, opened rhythmic paths that many bands would later travel, and, at the same time, marked the end of an era for Sepultura. Today, we possibly wouldn’t have Gojira or Slipknot without them and the influence of Roots.
Today, with the news of Sepultura’s final dissolution and their farewell tour, I have returned to an active listen of an album that is 30 years old. And the amazing thing isn’t that it still sounds powerful; the amazing thing is how well it has aged. That amalgam of styles, that Amazonian aesthetic, and that cry of identity are still there, intact. Listening to it, I don’t just hear music; I see myself, in my number 10 Brazil shirt and my trimmed cassette tape, discovering that the world was much bigger, noisier, and much wilder than I had been told.
