Sepultura: Beneath The Remains (Metal Matters series) [ROADRUNNER]

Why you'll love it

This Metal Matters reissue brings Beneath the Remains back to vinyl, remastered, on Roadrunner. It was the Brazilian band's first album for the label, reached No. 9 on the UK Indie Chart and was inducted into Decibel magazine's Hall of Fame in 2013.

This edition

• Metal Matters series
• Remastered

About the album

Roadrunner wasn't sure how a thrash band from Brazil would sell, so it handed Sepultura a budget of $8,000 and hoped for the best. Max Cavalera had spent a week in New York in February 1988 negotiating the deal, and the band answered with the record that carried them from local heroes to international contenders. Producer Scott Burns, fresh from work with Death, Obituary and Morbid Angel, took a modest fee partly because he was curious about Brazil, and the band recorded through the last half of December 1988 at Nas Nuvens Studio in Rio de Janeiro, from 8 pm to 5 am, in the same room where Titãs had made Cabeça Dinossauro.

After a deceptively gentle acoustic intro, the title track kicks the door in, and the album barely draws breath until the last crunch of "Primitive Future." "Inner Self" became the band's first music video and a regular on Headbanger's Ball, while "Stronger Than Hate" and "Mass Hypnosis" show the tighter, more technical writing that pointed toward Arise. It's also the first Sepultura album with cover art by Michael Whelan, his painting Nightmare in Red.

AllMusic called it one of the most essential death/thrash albums of all time, and it sent the band on their first tour outside Brazil, opening for Sodom. Igor Cavalera had already had part of a different Whelan painting tattooed on his arm for the cover they didn't use, which is what's known in the trade as commitment to the brief.

Also at Kops: more Sepultura on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Roadracer / Roadrunner (cat# R1 729189), a reissue of the 1989 album.