“I’m more than ready, man. I cannot wait to go back on the road.” Andrea Kisser is talking to Montreal Rocks from his home in São Paulo, Brazil. “Since like 2020, of course, with the new album, you know, we were ready to go on the road and hopefully that will happen this time around. Let’s see.”
The timing of the pandemic could hardly have been worse for his band, thrash metal legends Sepultura. Having just released their fifteenth studio album, Quadra in February 2020, the band were all set to begin a huge world tour when everything shut down.
“We put out the album in February, we started the whole promotion of the album in September, October when we played Rock in Rio,” Kisser recalls. “We went to France to do promo tours and I’ve been to Mexico and stuff. So, you know, we did everything up to the point. Except, of course, the most important of all, which is touring. You know, you go everywhere and you visit places and you change the energy and ideas with your fans. But it didn’t happen only to us, you know, it happened to the whole business. So we had to deal with that together, you know, and we found new and different ways to Sepultura because I never imagined Sepultura being a band without the road. You know, there’s no meaning to be a musician if you don’t have the road, at least from my point of view, you know. We like to be on the road. We like to travel.”
For 40 years, the Brazilian icons have been not only a band revered worldwide; they have been, are and forever will be at the very forefront of Thrash Metal, trailblazing ever since they released their long-since legendary debut album “Morbid Visions” in 1986. While quickly establishing themselves as leaders of the second wave of Thrash already in the late eighties, to this day they never came even close to stagnation. Quadra is proof of a will unbroken. Now three albums deep into what may very well be their strongest incarnation yet – uniting the talents of old-school members Kisser (guitars, vocals) and Paulo Xisto Pinto Jr. (bass), vocal force of nature Derrick Leon Green (vocals) and drummer Eloy Casagrande – SEPULTURA know how to put on a great show.
“I think the perfect show is when you really put everything out of the normal life or a normal day, and you put yourself during an hour and a half in a different world, you know, and you really go to the stage and you go to a different place, you act different, you feel different, you know. Every artist will tell you that, you know, if you see somebody on stage and off stage, it’s very different characteristics and atmosphere, you know? So once we are able to do that, that’s great, you know, that we are really gonna enjoy ourselves and really sing the lyrics with our fans and, you know, lights and all this stuff, and really be there without really thinking anything else. It really helps the whole atmosphere of being on stage, celebrating music. We don’t do, let’s say a political setlist, you know, we play from Bestial Devastation to Quadra, and that’s very cool because we have artistic freedom. And the fans, you know, they don’t want to know about all this bullshit that happens backstage, you know, like the fights with labels and managers and all that crap, you know, they want to go there and really enjoy the music. And as long as we keep this feeling and this spirit, you know, it’s going to be a great show for sure.”
“This week we went to the practice room and we start jamming around. We only played the new songs. You know, we played Isolation, we’ll play The Pentagram and Last Time. And we have seven songs off the new album on the setlist, which is great, you know, because we’re really representing what Quadra is all about. You know, the album, the tour is all about the new album, two years old, but still new because you’re still going to perform the songs, you know, and it felt great. I think The Pentagram, it’s a very challenging song to play, the instrumental one. You have a kind of a clean sound and it leads to a very weird tempo flowing throughout the whole song, but it’s a lot of fun to play, man. It’s fantastic.”
The tour reaches Montreal’s Corona Theatre on March 17 2022.
Support comes from with Sacred Reich, Crowbar, ART OF SHOCK
Watch the full interview with Andreas below:
Interview – Steve Gerrard
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