RIFF - 97 - Sepultura - Chaos AD
When a Jacket on the New York Subway Rewrote Metal's Rulebook Hosts: Neil & Chris Duration: ~80 minutes Release: 19 October 2026 Episode Description Sepultura's Chaos A.D. arrived in a year dominated by In Utero, Siamese Dream and Pearl Jam's Vs., which makes it one of the most gloriously out-of-step records of 1993. Four lads from Belo Horizonte, a Welsh residential studio, a producer fresh off mixing some of the biggest rock albums on the planet, and a sudden, hard-won political conscience. It shouldn't have worked. It absolutely did. Neil and Chris trace the band's journey from the barely-listenable tape-of-a-tape-of-a-tape days of Bestial Devastation, through Beneath the Remains (Neil's emotional touchstone and the T-shirt he wore until the sleeves fell off), into Arise, and finally to the moment Sepultura toured the world, saw Brazil from the outside, and realised they had something to say. The episode is peppered with archive interview clips from the band discussing the album's looseness, Andy Wallace's "just go in and play" approach, and why they refused to make Arise Part Two. What You'll Hear: How Refuse/Resist got its name from the back of a leather jacket on the New York subway The Scott Burns to Andy Wallace production shift and why it changed everything Why Rockfield Studios, Monmouth, is hallowed ground (Sabbath, Zeppelin, Queen, Oasis) The album's bizarre mid-forward, low-dynamic-range mix, run live through Audio Forge Korn, Deftones, Converge and Gojira: the direct line from this record The Max Cavalera split, Soulfly, and what Sepultura became afterwards Featured Tracks & Analysis: Neil's pick is We Who Are Not As Others, a riff that lives in the same live-moment pantheon as Slayer's Raining Blood. There's deep love for Territory, Slave New World, the New Model Army cover The Hunt, and the best song title in metal, Biotech Is Godzilla. The pair dig into Kaiowas, recorded at Chepstow Castle complete with seagulls, and Chris notes how Refuse/Resist shifts to an entirely different tempo map mid-song rather than the usual half-time metal move. Michael Whelan's iconic artwork gets its due too, originally conceived around Biotech Is Godzilla. Tangential Gold: The Riffology Vault: genre heatmaps, daily album battles and a "take me somewhere" button A Singapore bot, YouTube comments Neil forgot existed, and saying please to the AI Neil's catastrophic first weights session and an impassioned sponsorship pitch to ibuprofen gel Smuggling 4,000 painkillers back from America in 2006 and only just running out Barney, resistance bands, and an unfortunate elasticating incident Why This Matters: Some albums are a frozen point in time that simply cannot be replicated. Chaos A.D. is one of them: a band with newfound perspective, a producer pushing them toward their own Brazilian percussion, and the confidence to slow everything down when the world said metal was dead. It knocked a wall down, and plenty of bands walked through it. Perfect for: Thrash veterans, Gojira obsessives, production nerds, and anyone who ever stained a Beneath the Remains T-shirt beyond saving. You can find us here: Blog: https://riffology.co All Episodes: https://podkit.riffology.co/podcast iHeart: <a href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-riffology-ico