Brazilian Thrash Metal Bands: The Essential List

Brazil produced the most extreme music of the 1980s underground, and it did so under an economy in freefall, at the end of a military dictatorship, with no venues, no industry and imported records that cost a meaningful fraction of a monthly wage.

Everything that followed came out of one city and, largely, one record shop.

The conditions

A teenager in Belo Horizonte in 1985 who wanted to hear a German thrash record had three bad options: an import at a price nobody could pay, a tape from a foreign trader that took months and arrived third or fourth generation, or a copy of a friend's copy.

So the reference was never the record. It was a degraded rumour of the record, in which the guitars are a smear and the cymbals have vanished into hiss. When you set out to reproduce what you heard, you reproduce the degradation, and that is a direct technical explanation for why Brazilian metal came out rawer and more extreme than its sources.

Sepultura

Four teenagers, a father who had died two years earlier, a record shop that became a label, and a debut recorded in conditions that make the German budgets look comfortable. Morbid Visions in 1986 is difficult listening and unmistakably alive.

Then Schizophrenia, then Beneath the Remains in 1989, recorded in Rio with Scott Burns on overnight studio time by a band who had rehearsed until second takes were unnecessary. It is one of the four or five best records the genre has and the moment the map stopped being American.

Sarcofago

Formed by Wagner Lamounier, briefly Sepultura's singer, and considerably more extreme than the band he left. I.N.R.I. in 1987 has corpse paint on the sleeve, bullet belts and spikes, and drumming that is close to a blast beat before the technique had a name.

Norwegian musicians have said in print that this record and this photograph were on the table when they were deciding what their bands should look like. The visual language the world associates with a Scandinavian forest was photographed in Minas Gerais.

The rest

Vulcano from Santos, whose Bloody Vengeance in 1986 is as primitive and as convinced as anything from the period. Holocausto, whose war imagery is genuinely uncomfortable and whose music is ferocious. Chakal, Mutilator and Overdose, who shared the first Cogumelo release with Sepultura.

Later, Korzus, Ratos de Porao on the crossover side, and a second generation who arrived once there was finally an industry to arrive into.

What Brazil gave the rest of the world

Three things, and all three are larger than the country's commercial footprint would suggest.

The visual language of black metal, by way of a photograph taken in Minas Gerais in 1987. A blueprint for extremity that the Scandinavian scenes worked from. And, in Sepultura, the first band from outside the United States and Germany to make a record that the rest of the genre had to take seriously on its own terms rather than as a curiosity.

What none of it produced at the time was money. These records were pressed in small quantities on a label run out of a shop, and the people who made them were doing it with no expectation of ever leaving the country.

Where to start

With Beneath the Remains, which is a great record by any measure and requires no allowances. Then I.N.R.I., which requires several, and is the one that changed what the extreme end looked like.

The generation before Sepultura got out is covered in Sarcofago, Vulcano, Holocausto, and the wider account is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.

What a record cost

Worth putting numbers on, because the poverty is the mechanism rather than the colour.

Brazil in the second half of the 1980s ran inflation that at points exceeded a thousand per cent a year. An imported LP was priced accordingly, which put it out of reach of the teenagers who wanted it, and a domestic pressing was only possible if somebody local was willing to take the risk.

Studio time was bought in hours rather than days. Sepultura recorded Beneath the Remains on overnight sessions because they were cheaper, with the band rehearsing until second takes would not be needed. Equipment was borrowed, repaired and shared between bands, and a drum kit in Belo Horizonte in 1986 might appear on three different records.

Where the scene went afterwards

Sepultura got out, sold millions, restyled successfully with Chaos A.D., and then split acrimoniously in 1996. The band and Max Cavalera have been separate entities ever since, both making decent records that are not the thing either of them was.

The rest mostly did not get out and mostly kept going anyway. Vulcano, Chakal and Holocausto have all recorded in the decades since. Sarcofago stopped in 2000. Cogumelo still operates from the same city.

What changed is the audience. Brazil now has a substantial domestic metal industry, festivals that draw international bands, and a generation of groups who did not have to leave the country to be heard. That is a considerably better situation than the one that produced these records, and everybody involved would say so.

The word that gets used

A note on terminology, because it comes up constantly. Almost none of these bands are cleanly thrash by the technical definition, and the ones that matter most are the ones furthest from it.

Sarcofago are proto black metal. Holocausto sit between thrash and death metal. Sepultura's first two albums are closer to death metal than to anything from California, and only became thrash records with Beneath the Remains, by which point the band had access to a proper studio and a producer.

That is what happens when a scene is built from degraded copies: the categories the source material belonged to do not survive the transmission. Arguing about which label applies is less useful than noticing that a whole set of new ones came out of it.

Sources and notes

Years and labels refer to original pressings. Claims about the influence of Sarcofago on Norwegian black metal are drawn from published interviews with the musicians concerned.