Sepultura - Roots

Sepultura went to the Xavante village of Xingu with a DAT recorder and came back with the album that split their career in half. Roots, released by Roadrunner in 1996, is the record where a Brazilian thrash band stopped borrowing from American metal and started building from their own ground.

Ross Robinson produced it at the height of his run, and the sound is deliberately primitive: detuned to hell, percussion everywhere, riffs that move like machinery rather than melody. "Roots Bloody Roots" became the anthem and has never left a setlist since, while "Attitude" and "Ratamahatta" push the Brazilian percussion right to the front instead of treating it as decoration. Carlinhos Brown appears on the latter, and the tribal recordings made in Xingu run through the album's spine.

It sold over a million copies in the US and became the band's commercial peak, and also their last with Max Cavalera, who left within months of its release. Thirty years on it remains the most influential record either half of that split ever made, and the blueprint a whole generation of nu-metal bands worked from without ever matching.

This reissue is pressed on 140-gram vinyl across two LPs.