The Son of Metal
Growing up, Igor Amadeus Cavalera fit the archetype of a kid born around the turn of the millennium. He was a massive fan of Pokémon, watched shows on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and loved skateboarding with his friends. Attending school in Phoenix, Arizona was the fulcrum of his young life and he waited on summer vacation with as much anticipation as any other kid.
However, the family trips he went on in the summer were anything but ordinary. Cavalera would pack up some clothes and his Gameboy and cram into a tour bus with his large family while they embarked on numerous journeys of metal, mosh-pits, and mayhem.
The now 25-year-old Cavalera has always had metal in his veins. The youngest of seven children of the legendary Sepultura and Soulfly frontman Max Cavalera, he has led a life immensely shaped by music and a hectic family.
That initial exposure to and love of music has led Igor Cavalera to find success with his own band Healing Magic and recently with Go Ahead and Die, a highly anticipated band he started with his father during the pandemic.
For Cavalera though, his affinity for music and literature is a signifier for his true love of storytelling, so he can channel the mounds of life experience that come from travelling the world throughout his life.
Many might think that life with a rock-star dad would be lavish and luxurious, but Cavalera’s upbringing was relatively humble.
“I grew up in the suburbs in Phoenix, in a primarily white and Latino community. [At home] everything was provided — we weren’t poor or anything like that — but it was also kind of chaotic,” he said.
“When you have a bunch of siblings, you all have different interests. There was always a lot of stuff going on because of that, but we all had a very stable upbringing. We got to travel a lot, which I think is good for anybody who’s young.”
Experiencing a lot of different environments at a young age while on tour with his parents was incredibly important for Cavalera, as the many new things around the world he would see would pique his naturally curious mind.
“I like words a lot, and when I was a kid I would pay attention to airport signs because they’ll tell you basic things like ‘hello,’ ‘exit’ and ‘entrance’ in every language everywhere in the world you go. I like animals too so I would always look out for what wildlife was in the area we were at and what the ecosystem was like. Those were always the things that I would kind of nerd out about,” Cavalera said.
The frantic travelling also afforded Cavalera the chance to visit many historical locations and museums like the Smithsonian, The Louvre, Stonehenge, the Berlin Wall and countless other places in cities that the tours would stop at around the globe.
Cavalera’s interest in music grew as he would become inspired by his father’s performances with Soulfly and how energetic their crowds would be. He began to gravitate toward learning instruments, starting with drums.
In 2007, he started to occasionally hop on the drum-kit onstage with his dad to play a song or two and he instantly loved the feeling of playing in front of a crowd.
“The first time I was ever on stage to do anything was in Paris in 2007 at Le Bataclan, which was the club that got attacked during the Eagles of Death Metal show [by ISIS terrorists in 2015]. To think that went down in a club that I’ve played at before is just a really really weird thing,” Cavalera said.
As he grew older, the balance between school life and life on tour began to shift. Into his teenage years as he began to become more cognizant of the world around him. He started to realize that most of the education that was sticking with him was being brought to him by music.
“I felt like [school] was honestly a waste of my time and boxing in my creativity and intelligence in a way. I wanted to learn about more intricate stuff that actually suits my needs. I don’t care to learn about some mathematical formula that would help a scientist. I wanted to learn about art, creating, and writing,” Cavalera said.
“I like academics, it’s weird man, and I kind of feel like a conundrum because academics and learning are so important. But how you do it is equally as important and I’m just one of those people who realize I learn really well by walking out of my door, getting into the world and learning it. When I come home I feel smarter, like I leveled up my intelligence in my stats if life was a role-playing game.”
While Cavalera mulled over his place and motivation at school, he got to work on forming his first metal band, Mold Breaker, in 2011 when he was 15 years old.
Wanting to form a band with his older brother Zyon who also played drums, Igor took up playing guitar and created the project with three other Phoenix area locals.
Mold Breaker released an EP and played a handful of live shows in Phoenix, but with the project being composed of a group of rowdy teenagers it disbanded not too long after they had formed.
“We were incredibly obnoxious, just a bunch of 15- and 16-year-old kids. We only played like six or seven shows, all of which were insanely chaotic because all our friends weren’t really metalheads and didn’t know how to mosh and would start just hitting people. I think every club we played would never want us back,” Cavalera said
After Mold Breaker, Cavalera still wanted to pursue his musical ambitions and founded Lody Kong in 2011, again with Zyon, and Mold Breaker bassist Shanks Fahey. Cavalera would return as a guitar player and later as a bassist, but would now fill in as the band’s vocalist.
Lody Kong, named after an inside joke around a friend’s name, turned into the first serious project for Cavalera, going on multiple tours around the U.S., Europe, and South America supporting Soulfly and releasing two EPs and a full-length album called “Dreams and Visions” on Mascot Label Group.
A mix of metal, hardcore punk, and grunge, Lody Kong found their sound relatively early. Reception to the new project was mixed, with many people endlessly questioning or complaining about the nonsensical nature of the name. Despite the criticism, Lody Kong remained dedicated and were consistently playing shows while working on new music.
As he was working on music with Lody Kong, Cavalera’s love of storytelling was leading him to explore writing.
“I play music to tell stories, so the stories come first. I would do this thing with my dad when I was little called picture time and I would tell my dad to draw a monster I came up with because he can draw and I can’t. I think that was my first experience telling stories and it turned into writing as I became older. I’m diabetic and when my parents wouldn’t let me hang out with my friends outside when I was young because of my sugar, I would read books as an escape and I read a lot,” Cavalera said.
An immense fan of Steven King and the horror genre, Cavalera would begin to focus his writing efforts on horror and authored his first novel “Killing My Insomnia” in 2016, a horror novel about a young man suffering from a slow mental unravel brought on by supernatural forces while working at a graveyard.
Metal is often associated with wild partying, and in Lody Kong Cavalera had his own fair share of it.
The now young adults in the band had their lifestyles consumed with drugs and drinking and cracks were starting to show behind the scenes.
“It was that teenage angst driven even further. [Our album] Dreams and Visions was the product of all of us being on a serious amount of drugs. It was chaotic, crazy and unstructured. We went through line-up changes and it was still crazy because it was fueled by tons of narcotics most of the way through,” Cavalera said.
While Lody Kong offered Cavalera his first venture into being a professional musician full-time, after seven hard years with changes in personnel and contrasting lifestyles after Cavalera got clean from drugs, the band would ultimately break up in 2018.
“Lody Kong was the first time we did real stuff. We toured the states nine times, we toured Europe five or six times. It was a learning experience and all the chaos and substance abuse was just us finding ourselves in a way and just going totally insane to find out what the limits were. We were young and mean to each other and I think once we were sufficiently doped up, fighting and mad at each other it was like ‘all right, it’s come to this,’” Cavalera said.
After the breakup and now a newly married man, Cavalera left his native Phoenix and moved to Sarasota, Florida with his wife Aggy in 2019. But a long hiatus from music was not on the cards for Cavalera, as he and former Lody Kong guitarist Travis Stone immediately set out to form another project.
In need of a drummer, Stone received a tip from a friend about someone who had also recently left their band. After a direct message on Instagram from Stone pitching the new project as a “really really heavy Black Sabbath,” drummer Johnny Valles responded almost immediately and was on board.
They then set out to record their first songs in an EP called “Restoration.”
“We went out on a limb and were looking for anyone who was down to jam. We sent Johnny the demos, he practiced them for like a week and then we went out to Arizona to record. I’m not exaggerating here, we practiced for one day and then the next day we laid all the tracks down. Travis and I were completely amazed and the next thing we knew we had a band,” Cavalera said.
Healing Magic would then be christened by the three, taking the name from Cavalera’s favorite role of being a healer in his beloved fantasy game Elder Scrolls Online. While Lody Kong took its influence from endless partying, the new stoner rock trio drew upon nature and fantasy elements for their songs.
The band would also sign a record deal with Blood Blast Records, a subsidiary of titanic metal label Nuclear Blast Records.
After the release of the EP, Healing Magic would go on tour with Soulfly in Europe in 2019. However, Stone, who played lead guitar in Healing Magic, would also join grindcore giants Pig Destroyer as their bassist in this period.
With the task of learning an established band’s entire back catalogue of music as well as tour and create with Healing Magic, the balance in the band began to shift for Stone and he eventually left to join Pig Destroyer full-time.
With just Cavalera and Valles as the two sole members of Healing Magic, the pair were determined to not let the band go by the wayside.
Cavalera switched from bass back to guitar to fill the void left by Stone and the pair picked up right where they had left off.
Then, the pandemic took the world by storm and changed the way that they would approach the music.
They cooped themselves up at the Cavalera’s ranch in the Martian-like landscape of New River, Arizona, just north of Phoenix. There, like many other musicians forced inside because of quarantines, they set to work on their first full length album called “Fire.”
They enlisted Today Is The Day frontman Steve Austin to engineer and record their album and flew him and his recording gear out from Maine to the desert.
“Fire is one of the proudest things I’ve ever created. We did it on my family’s property and we were getting spiritually high the entire time and just getting super introverted. I think over the 12 or 13 days we were recording it we only left the property twice to go to the grocery store and weed store,” Cavalera said.
Being in Arizona during the quarantine gave Cavalera the chance to hang out with his father a lot. The two would spend their days watching horror movies and talking about music.
They had floated the idea of starting a project together since 2018, but the pandemic allowed them to finally work on it and title the band Go Ahead And Die.
“My dad and I were like ‘let’s make a politically driven, heavy and fast record’ back in 2018. My pops was just too busy, they’re working themselves to death and they tour so goddamn much but then the pandemic hit. I was sitting on my ass and was like ‘well why don’t I go to Arizona and work on that project with my dad?’” Cavalera said.
They demoed the songs in the summer of 2020 and record label Nuclear Blast became interested in the project and signed the band.
The band recorded their debut album in the winter of 2020, which is slated for release in June, and have released two singles so far, “Truckload Full Of Bodies” and “Toxic Freedom.”
“Certain people are taking it the wrong way and I love it because I fully intended for the record to do that. It has some strong antigovernmental and anti-police lyrics and symbolism. 2020 was such an insane year and I don’t think we’ll have anything like that again, I think the vibe and topic of the record is super relevant,” Cavalera said.
In what many would consider to be an extraordinary life, Cavalera has a humbleness that many might not expect. Lifetime’s worth of experiences have happened to him in a mere quarter of a century, but Cavalera knows that his story is still in the process of being told.
In what seems to be his fashion, he likes to analyze life like a video game.
“I feel like each time I go out into the world, it’s like going on a quest, and when you get back from that quest you’re going to level up or you’re going to have to repeat it. I feel like we’re all just trying to level up. Sometimes you start out barely scraping by, then you get some nice armor and a staff and you know some much better spells than you did 10 years ago, and now you’re ready to do that same quest again,” Cavalera said.
“Except this time, you’re going to kick its ass.”
