MAX CAVALERA Says New CAVALERA CONSPIRACY Album 'Psychosis' 'Sounds On Fire'

AndrewHaug.com, Australia's first-ever dedicated 24/7 rock and metal online radio station launched by Andrew Haug, the former host of Triple J's "The Racket" radio show (originally "Full Metal Racket"; 2001-2011),recently conducted an interview with CAVALERA CONSPIRACY frontman Max Cavalera (also of SOULFLY). You can listen to the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On how he gets his brother Igor to shift gears from his side gigs as a DJ and into writing mode for CAVALERA CONSPIRACY:

Max: "It's in his heart, it's in his blood. I think the stuff he does, I think that's on the side. Igor has always been adventurous. When we were back in the early days, [SEPULTURA] 'Schizophrenia' days, he would always be jamming BEASTIE BOYS and RUN-DMC and stuff like that. I didn't quite understand it; that wasn't my cup of tea. But, he was always into different stuff like that. It didn't come as a total surprise that he was doing that. But, I know how to get the 'metal' out of him. [Laughs] It's not too hard. He loves it. He loves playing. We actually found a really cool producer this time, this guy Arthur Rizk. He did INQUISITION, POWER TRIP. He was killer. He was great. He was the perfect guy for the album. He had a great knowledge of the underground, knew a lot about the newer, heavy stuff that's coming out, but also knew about old stuff and knew my and Igor's catalog entirely. So the record is kind of rooted in the stuff that we did in those days, like 'Schizophrenia', 'Beneath The Remains', 'Arise', but with a twist of right now, with the noise of right now, stuff like FULL OF HELL, NAILS, BÖLZER, stuff we listen to. We have a song with Justin [Broadrick] from GODFELSH called 'Hellfire'. GODFLESH is one of my favorite bands; it was great having Justin sing on it. We have an instrumental that is a bit like prog rock, which is going to be a surprise for a lot of people. Igor went to Uganda and recorded a lot of tribal rhythms and brought a bunch of shit back. I was, like, 'We have to use this shit; it's cool.' It's like frog sounds from the jungle and tribal drums and shit. So I had this riff that was really cool and never used it. It's a bit like some of the stuff I listen to like ISIS, RUSSIAN CIRCLES. It's really proggy, but it's really cool, so it's in the middle of the record, but the rest of the record is just bestiality, brutality, all the way, it starts with this fucking awesome riff, no intro or nothing, just the guitar riff [mimics the guitar riff]. It's really cool. We did a song called 'Crom', which is about the father of Conan [The Barbarian]. I watched 'Conan' and I was really inspired by the movie; it's a great movie. In the beginning, his mom gets decapitated and he is sitting with Crom on the top of the mountain. I thought that would be kind of cool. First, the album was going to be about terrorists, but it's not about that. Every record is like that. It starts with something, but never ends up being exactly that.

"Yeah, it's cool man. There's a lot of cool parts on it. There's one song, 'Impalement Execution', which is a very death metal title. It has six thrash riffs. We used to call it, the nickname of the song was 'Thrasher's Delight'. Because it was like the legacy of thrash. It was a 'thrasher's paradise.' Six riffs together, one after the other. Some of them with guitar solos, some of them I'm singing on it. Some of the vocal patterns are back to early stuff, like what I did on 'Schizophrenia' and albums like that. That was cool; that's going to surprise a lot of people. [Marc] Rizzo [guitar] did great as always. Igor's drumming is awesome, especially on 'Judas Pariah'. That one goes back to 'Morbid Visions' type of black metal; it's cool. It's really powerful. Yeah, it's a good record. I think a lot of people are going to like it. We needed one like that. I like the first one a lot, 'Inflikted', I thought that was really good. 'Blunt Force Trauma' was a bit too similar to 'Inflikted', but not as powerful. 'Pandemonium' was really recorded shitty on purpose. We wanted it to sound underground. Some people didn't get it. So we needed something really cool and that sounds really on fire. I think this album puts us back on that track. I think it's good."

On what keeps him "present" and moving forward:

Max: "I think we have one foot in the past and one in the future, which I think is good. It's kind of like how we are doing things with the 'Return To Roots' tour, the NAILBOMB tour, that's revisiting our past, which I think is important because those are really cool records and worth revisiting and showing, especially to a lot of new fans that don't know about this stuff, I think it's cool to show them that's where it came from. Then there's the right-now stuff that we do like the CAVALERA album, the new SOULFLY next year. I like [SOULFLY's 2015 album] 'Archangel' a lot; I thought it was a pretty cool record. I don't know; I love metal. I'm a metal fan. I'm not like those guys 'Oh, only the old times are good. There's nothing new good.' No, there's a lot of good stuff, man. I'm extremely excited for the underground that's coming up, stuff like GATECREEPER and HOMEWRECKER and GENOCIDE PACT, DYING FETUS's last record was great. I love stuff like GOJIRA. Here in Australia, you have a lot of cool stuff like RUINS that I just checked out and it was great. Yeah, I'm a metal fan at heart. I listen to metal all the time. I still get excited. I still get influenced by a lot of the metal that goes into my music."

CAVALERA CONSPIRACY's fourth album, "Psychosis", will be released on November 17 via Napalm Records.