Sepultura recorded Roots between October and December 1995 at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, California, with Ross Robinson producing and the band co-producing. That setup sounds familiar enough. What makes Roots unlike anything else in the metal catalog is what happened on November 5 of that year, when Max Cavalera, Igor Cavalera, Andreas Kisser, Paulo Jr., and Ross Robinson flew into the Mato Grosso state of Brazil to spend time inside the Xavante reservation at the Aldeia Pimentel Barbosa. They came back with the tapes that became "Itsári," a track recorded live with the Xavante tribe, no overdubs, whose title translates to "roots" in the Xavante language. The chant captured there is the "Datsi Wawere" healing ceremony. That is the spine of this record, a deliberate act of cultural reckoning by four men who had spent a decade building their name in a scene that had no room for where they came from.
The ground for Roots was laid on Chaos A.D. in 1993, specifically on "Kaiowas," an acoustic track built on percussive exchanges between Igor Cavalera and Paulo Jr. that sketched the direction the band would spend the next two years developing. Carlinhos Brown, already a significant figure in Brazilian popular music and rooted in the Candomblé percussion traditions of Salvador, Bahia, came into the Indigo Ranch sessions and guided and arranged the ensemble percussion sections throughout the album. His energy in the studio was relentless. Brown contributed percussion, vocals, and compositional credit to "Ratamahatta," "Dictatorshit," and "Endangered Species," and his fingerprints are audible across the record. "Ratamahatta" moves on a rhythm that belongs to Brown as much as to Igor's kit. "Attitude," the second track and second single, opens with the berimbau, a single-string Brazilian instrument credited to Brown, before the riff drops in and reminds you that this band could still dismantle a room.
Ross Robinson was the right producer for this record because he understood physicality. He had just come off Korn's debut album, and his instinct was to get the room loud and the performances raw. At Indigo Ranch, he pushed Sepultura to write the bulk of the material in the studio, with minimal pre-production. The result is a record that sounds like it was discovered rather than assembled. "Roots Bloody Roots," the opener and lead single released in February 1996, hits with a locked-in groove that carries a rhythmic undertow from somewhere further south than California. The tempo is lower, the syncopation heavier, the space between the notes wider. Igor Cavalera's drumming across the album is the most sophisticated work he ever committed to tape, absorbing samba and indigenous percussion patterns into a double-bass framework without flattening either source.
The guest list on Roots tells you exactly where the band was standing in 1995 and who they were in conversation with. Mike Patton of Faith No More, Jonathan Davis of Korn, David Silveria of Korn, and DJ Lethal of House of Pain all appear on "Lookaway," a track that sits in the middle of the record like a deliberate provocation. Davis wrote the lyrics. The cover art pushed the statement further: Michael Whelan's design placed a Karajá tribesman's face, drawn from a 1990 Brazilian 1000 Cruzeiro banknote, at the center of the record's visual identity. The band was putting Brazil on the front.
What made the Xavante collaboration genuinely strange, in the best sense, was something Igor Cavalera described in a 1996 interview. The Xavante compose music only through dreams. A tribe member dreams the music and then translates the dream into sound. The healing ceremony chant captured on "Itsári" arrived through that process. Sepultura, a band that had built its reputation on precision and aggression, flew recording equipment into the cerrado of Mato Grosso and captured music whose origin was literally a dream. That "Itsári" sits at the center of a record that also contains "Cut-Throat" and "Spit," two tracks of pure crushing weight, is the argument the album makes about itself.
Roots peaked at number four on the UK Albums Chart when it was released in Europe on February 20, 1996, and arrived in the United States on March 12 via Roadrunner Records. It was the last studio album to feature Max Cavalera, who left the band in late 1996. That exit has cast a long shadow over how the record gets discussed, as if it were primarily a farewell or a fracture point. The album is the fullest statement Sepultura ever made about who they were and where they came from, built by four musicians at the peak of their collective ability, with a producer willing to follow them anywhere, including onto a plane into the Brazilian interior. The Xavante write their music in dreams. Sepultura made a record that earns that company.
