“For me, there’s not really a reason to go back to Sepultura” – Max Cavalera denies any opportunity for a reunion

In a recent interview, Max Cavalera has shared his future plans and addressed some talks there’s been about a potential reunion with his former group, Sepultura. The frontman was asked his thoughts about their farewell tour and the rumours as well.

My insight about the whole thing is I’m kind of surprised by it, you know. As far as a reunion – I wanted to reunite with my brother and that’s what he also said a long time ago when we first got together. So to me that was the real reunion, me and him, and we did that and it’s opened the doors for all these re-recordings and playing, all these records. It is so cool the way we’re doing them. We have like an unwritten rule between me and Igor, like we’re gonna do this thing now differently than how we did it back then, because back then there was a lot of drama and stress that we didn’t like, and a lot of political stuff. So it was like, if we’re gonna do it now, we’re gonna do it for the love of it, you know for the pure enjoyment of the thing. That’s how we’ve been doing all these years, with all these tours and recordings and everything. So for me, there’s not really a reason to go back to Sepultura. I know it would be back to more stress and stuff that I don’t really need in my life, man, and I think us playing live, and even having like Travis and Igor Amadeus with us is so badass because they connect with the younger generation. Yeah, I don’t see a need to do a reunion and I think more than ever now, especially now that they’re gonna disband. The band is done and me and Igor will get to keep doing what we want with Cavalera Conspiracy, which is Sepultura in itself.

He continues to explain:

The more the time passes by, the more I feel that I don’t need to. Like I said, the real reunion is between myself and Igor, and I did that. It’s pure magic and amazing what we’re doing right now. You kind of have to realize if we end up doing a Sepultura reunion, it’s almost like we can’t go back to the Cavalera thing, You know? It won’t really make sense. People probably will be like “I don’t want to go watch Cavalera if they’re doing a “real” reunion. To me, I don’t want to do that because I love what we have here in Cavalera now. It’s so Bad ass. So yeah, it’s definitely out of the question. You can ask Igor the same question. He doesn’t want to do it either. I think people can just give up, it’s not gonna happen man. It’s not gonna happen. It had its time. You have all the videos to watch and we’re still carrying it. The spirit is with us, the spirit of the whole thing is with me and Igor right now in Cavalera. They’re gonna call it quits, they’re gonna be done and it is what it is. We’re still here. We’re still playing. We’re still gonna celebrate all the efforts. And then who knows, later we can just do the best of the whole Max era. I don’t want to go into detail why, but it’s pretty much the same reason I left them back in ‘96. I feel the same way.

It also turns out that perhaps someone who was being thought of as guilty, is actually irrelevant to the story.

It was a lot of betrayal and a lot of stuff that people don’t know about. I think that’s where the problem arises. People are so misinformed. The first thing they do is blame Gloria. Like “oh yeah, she broke up the band”. To me, that is the craziest thing ever, because her contract was done. You know, she was pretty much done. They asked her to stay and manage me, but she didn’t want to. She even told me that I should stay in the band, but I didn’t want to either. So I told them “No, we’re not doing that”. I’m out, you know. Out by my own integrity. And I couldn’t do the thing anymore after everything that happened with Dana and all that. So it’s like, when I see those things on the internet, people saying shit, they don’t know the whole story. It’s really easy to scapegoat one person, they just blame her for breaking up the band. But if you really ask the people that were in the know, everybody in the know knows that’s not true. That is not true. The four of us grew apart from each other. It happens in bands all the time. And it’s just one of those things, man. I just couldn’t stay with them anymore. I had to leave, man. And then, you know, I was really missing my brother. And now I’m back with him. So now more than ever, I don’t see a reason to do a reunion.

While this is a hard news for all of us, Max is still excited about the re-release of Sepultura records under the Cavalera Conspiracy name.

Right now, the Schizophrenia block just takes the whole show to another level. My favorite song that we’re playing right now is “Septic Schizo”. It’s a deep cut from Schizophrenia. We never even played that song live very much, and of course, “From The Past Comes Storms” that you know, has a triplet opening riff that has become like a trademark riff that I did back in the years, and still today. When that part hits, you can see the crowd is at attention, man. It creates this excitement in the air, but the whole set is really cool, man. We get to do an hour and a half, the best of these three records and some other stuff that we’re gonna keep changing as the tour goes by. We keep changing the end of the set, but it’s really cool, and of course we toss in some Chaos A.D.

What comes next now? Max shares:

I mean, you’re right, I keep trying to make the Soulfly records as interesting as they can too. I think this new one is really interesting. It’s going to be really interesting for many reasons, one of them being the death of my mom who passed last year. So it’s a huge thing in my life and I’m gonna dedicate the record to her. So it’s really gonna be the most heartfelt Soulfly record ever made. Now that I have the Cavalera extreme fix pretty much satisfied, I can actually explore different things for Soulfly. A different Sonic avenue, so I think we can be more adventurous. So i’m really excited for the new Soulfly that’s probably dropping next year.