'Discography' is a series originating at Roadrunner UK that interviews an artist going album-by-album through their catalog. While Soulfly were in the UK at the start of their 9-week touring assault throughout Europe, RR UK caught up with frontman Max Cavalera to talk about the band's discography.

In this 4th part of our 5-part Discography series with Soulfly's mainman, Cavalera walks us through the making of these two albums before bringing us full circle to the band's current release Omen tomorrow. Read his insights below and be sure to check back for the final installment tomorrow!

"Dark Ages was a complete departure from anything commercial. We went heavy all the way. It’s a black album cover, it’s a dark album with songs like ‘Frontlines’, ‘Carved Inside’, ‘Babylon’ and ‘I and I’.

"It’s a return to the thrash metal feeling from the Sepultura days, I rewrote a lot of riffs that had been inside me for a long time.

"It was a dark time too- we had the death of Dimebag in the same month we were in the studio, and my first grandson also died. That’s where the name Dark Ages came from."



"Conquer was recorded in Orlando in a house. One of Bobby’s (Burns, bassist) friends, Tim, had a studio, he’s a metalhead with Slayer posters all over the wall. It was cool. It was like a friend that you had 20 years ago, and you go stay in his house. He was totally into the music, and he helped me produce and engineer the record.

"Conquer got really amazing reviews. A lot of people really like it. It came out of Dark Ages which people thought was our best album, but people thought this was even better."

Click here to continue reading Max's entire reflection...

'Discography' is a series originating at Roadrunner UK that interviews an artist going album-by-album through their catalog. While Soulfly were in the UK at the start of their 9-week touring assault throughout Europe, RR UK caught up with frontman Max Cavalera to talk about the band's discography.

In this brutally honest part 3 of our Discography series with Soulfly, Max Cavalera discusses his own disappointment in the band's third album 3 and his joy in the writing and recording of the bands 2004 follow-up to that Prophecy. For those who missed yesterday's discussion of Primitive or Monday's discussion of the band's self-titled debut, click here for part 1 and click here for part 2.

"3 for me is the weakest Soulfly album. It's an uninspired name, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. The original name was Downstroy, but I think out of laziness I changed it.

"Out of that album, two things came out good. 'Seek and Strike', which we still play live and which has a great bouncy riff, and 'Last of the Mohicans' (called'L.O.T.M.' on the album itself). Everything else on that record is really not that good. I think it was a little bit rushed, and I wasn't very inspired."



"Prophecy came out like a big revelation for everybody, it was a great album. I was back, my creative shit was back again, and it turned out to be a great record with songs like 'Prophecy', 'Living Sacrifice', and 'Mars' with the flamenco jam that Marc does every night.

"I went to Serbia to record with Eyesburn, where we did one of the first metal/dub/reggae songs, called 'Moses'. There's a professor of music who played bagpipes and all these weird instruments which I think was really cool, and Dave Ellefson from Megadeth played bass on three tracks.



"In the end, I think that's where you can hear the first signs that we're going heavier. There was a 'the heavier the better' attitude and that was the case."

Click here to continue reading Max's entire reflection...

'Discography' is a series originating at Roadrunner UK that interviews an artist going album-by-album through their catalog. While Soulfly were in the UK at the start of their 9-week touring assault throughout Europe, RR UK caught up with frontman Max Cavalera to talk about the band's discography.

Yesterday we posted Max's account of Soulfly's 1998 self-titled debut, and today we've got Cavalera discussing the band's sophomore album, Primitive:

"Primitive was a guest album! I still don’t know how I pulled all these people together. We had so many people on that one album, and they all flew in for it.



"Sean Lennon stayed at my house for five days to record one song. We went out to the desert – he’d never been in the desert before – and went off-road driving with him. We wrote the beginning of the song (‘Son Song’) in the middle of the desert with acoustic guitars, his part was more like a rock part. We did our parts in the studio.

"The album was recorded in Mesa, which is a fucked-up suburb of Phoenix. It’s a ‘white-power’ place, everyone is either a redneck or a recovering drug addict- that’s the vibe of the place. We had a motorhome parked in front of the studio, that was where we hung out the whole time.



"On the song ‘Mulambo’ – which has about a hundred people singing the chorus – we had so many friends come down we had to record in a parking lot behind the studio!"

Click here to continue reading Max's entire reflection on Soulfly's Primitive release...

'Discography' is a series originating at Roadrunner UK that interviews an artist going album-by-album through their notable catalog. While Soulfly were in the UK at the start of their 9-week touring assault throughout Europe, RR UK caught up with frontman Max Cavalera to talk about the band's lengthy discography.

Starting with the Soulfly's 1998 self-titled debut, Max pontificates on the making of the album and how he feels about it looking back after all these years:

" ...The musicians were Lucio (Maia), a great Brazilian guitar player who plays bossanova-style Brazilian guitar mixed with Jimi Hendrix, really tasty guitar playing – he did a lot of cool stuff on the record. We had Roy (Mayorga – drums) and Marcello (D. Rapp – bass) in the band too. Roy’s an amazing drummer, he still kicks ass today. He made great beats for the record, I love the beats he did on ‘Eye For An Eye’ – he wrote it on a drum machine but translated it to a live set, with the same energy. Marcello’s a really good bass player too- he was a Sepultura roadie for many years so we were friends from when we were teenagers. He started playing bass and got really good at it, so I invited him to be part of Soulfly from the beginning.



"[Recording with new people after Sepultura] was scary, I didn’t know if I could trust these guys with the burden of coming from albums like Roots and Chaos AD, it was a huge space to fill, but they did great. The album sounds amazing, really powerful. It’s a lot of people’s favourite Soulfly album.

"To me, there’s a lot of pride involved because it was my first American Gold album, before Sepultura achieved that. It’s on my wall, it has huge value to me. It was also Gold in Australia..."

Click here to continue reading Max's entire reflection on Soulfly's eponymous release...

Soulfly are coming back to Ireland this summer.

August 1 - Dublin, Ireland @ The Academy (tickets)
August 2 - Belfast, Ireland @ Spring and Airbrake (tickets)

Photo courtesy of Zeltia Fernandez via Facebook