Sepultura: Life Out Of death

When a band is on the verge of releasing a brand new record and sharing their creation, it’s their moment to shine and take the world by storm once again. For Brazil’s finest SEPULTURA, this time in the spotlight was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. After releasing their 15th studio album Quadra in February 2020, they were unable to tour the record and set up a new way to connect with their fans. Taking place every Wednesday, SepulQuarta became a place for the band, the fans and some of their fellow musicians to meet up and talk to one another. The band’s long-standing lead guitarist Andreas Kisser took some time to invite us into this world he’s lived in for the last 16 months.

“Especially because we had a new album, we didn’t want to let that down or let it die because we didn’t have that communication. We also lost the stage, the backstage, the tour bus, where a band is a band,” he begins. “It was a great event that really kept the band alive and we saw that we could be SEPULTURA without touring, which was my main concern. What is SEPULTURA if it’s not touring and on the stage? We found out that we are much more than that which was great that we could keep together as a band, united and working together towards the same objective and we created a fantastic album doing that which was not even planned.”

Starting out as a fun way to play live music for their fans, the band started inviting special guests on to the show. With each guest playing on a track from the band’s 35-year back catalogue, it wasn’t long before the band had assembled a great collection of material unintentionally. Sitting halfway between a live album and a studio recording, SepulQuarta was born out of itself and represents people coming together despite being in their own homes all over the world. 

“After six months or so, people were commenting saying that it would be a cool thing to put together. We had amazing guests and the whole of SEPULTURA’s career, especially side Bs and side Cs, like songs that we never played live or ones that are very hard to perform or whatever so we kind of used that opportunity to do that. Only at the end of 2020 when we decided to stop SepulQuarta, we realised we had some fucking amazing material on our hands and we had to do it.”

Featuring guests like Scott Ian, Matt Heafy and Devin Townsend, the record itself is a celebration of the band’s career by going back and revisiting old tracks with some of their friends they’ve met along the way. The beauty of this album’s circumstances is that it was born out of nothing but a love of playing music and sharing it. By being forced to record it from their own homes, this also opened up new opportunities that the band could explore.

“It’s a very unique and new situation of working and writing and recording. Technology really gave us this possibility and like Ratamahatta, which is a song that has three drummers, imagine trying to organise that on stage and even in a studio. It can be done of course but with thousands of microphones and sound checks and time but this time, one of the drummers sent his material recorded from his backyard with his phone and it was great, the sound is on the album. It was really a homemade effort that we managed to do within the limitations we had so it’s a very special album and I’m very happy and proud.”

Most importantly, the SepulQuarta event and subsequent album symbolise how the band were able to stay connected with their fans after having all of their live shows cancelled. Despite releasing an album and not being able to fully embrace their time in the spotlight, they haven’t gone away. By staying in contact with each other and their fans, the band were able to carry on doing what they do best and in the process of that, emerge with an album that could’ve only happened at this point in time.

“I really thought SEPULTURA wouldn’t be possible without touring, or any band for that matter, but we showed that this isn’t the case and we can be a lot more and be SEPULTURA in many different ways and that’s powerful and motivating in many different ways for all of us,” Andreas explains. “The best thing about it is SepulQuarta is not done, we can bring it back anytime. We even used it to release an official video for Guardians Of Earth which was from the new album and we have a partnership with the Amazon frontline, the whole idea of SepulQuarta was about the environment and that’s nothing new to SEPULTURA. SepulQuarta was something that really grew up fast and we can use it in the future in many different ways because it’s a really powerful tool that allows us to connect to a lot of people quickly and talk to a lot of people all around the world. The album came out because we created Sepulquarta and not the other way around.”

SepulQuarta is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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