MAX CAVALERA Is Excited To Begin Work On Next SOULFLY Album

SOULFLY mainman Max Cavalera recently spoke to "Rock Talk With Mitch Lafon" about the band's upcoming follow-up to 2015's "Archangel" album, tentatively due next year via Nuclear Blast.

Max, who is currently taking part in the "Point Blank With Soulfly" tour, where SOULFLY is performing NAILBOMB's lone studio album, 1994's "Point Blank", in full, said: "Next year is a big year for us, because it's the anniversary of the first [SOULFLY] record that came out in '98. And also our new record will come out on Nuclear Blast. They're very behind the record; they're really excited for the new SOULFLY record.

"I'm gonna start working on it when I'm done with the NAILBOMB tour," he continued. "But I already kind of know what I wanna do with the record, which is kind of return a little bit more to some of the tribal sounds that I explored in an earlier phase of SOULFLY; I wanna maybe return to some of those. Some of [it] will be a continuation of what I did on 'Archangel', which a lot of people really like 'Archangel' a lot, so I'm gonna continue some of that kind of stuff. But it will be a really exciting year, because we'll have a new album in a year that commemorates twentieth year of our first record. So all that together should be really cool. So it's gonna be a year of new music and touring, so it should be a lot of fun and I should be pretty busy throughout the whole year."

Cavalera, who exited SEPULTURA in 1996 after the rest of the band fired his wife, Gloria, as the group's manager, went on to say that the "really cool" thing about SOULFLY "is the tribe that we created, because it's the fans, and I see that everywhere. The SOULFLY tattoos, the amount of tattoos that I see is overwhelming — there are so many of them. And there are huge, huge SOULFLY fans that really love SOULFLY a lot, which is great. I didn't really expect that. I always thought I was gonna be connected with SEPULTURA, connected to the past, but that wasn't really the case. They love what I did with SEPULTURA, but they love SOULFLY — they're really a part of this tribe and they are proud of it. So many times during the '[Return To] Roots' tour, a lot of people showed up in SOULFLY t-shirts, just to support SOULFLY."

According to Max, SOULFLY's message has evolved over the years to where it now "deals with tribal things, political things and spiritual things, and a lot of things dealing with tragedies and stuff. So when I hear that my music has helped people through hard times, to me it's the coolest thing that I could have probably done with my music — to actually help somebody else going through a hard time," he said. "And you can't put a price on that. I think that's the coolest thing you can do with the music — give that much power to other people through your music. Sometimes we're not even there — we just make the records and put it out, and we don't really see what happens after the record comes out. But it goes into people's life and it becomes something real big in their life, and I think that's really cool and that's something I'm very proud of."

Max and his brother, former SEPULTURA drummer Igor Cavalera, have spent the last year celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the band's "Roots" album by performing the LP in its entirety all over the world.