Go Ahead and Die

Go Ahead and Die

In what might be the most extreme father-son collaboration in music history, Soulfly/ex-Sepultura main man Max Cavalera and his son Igor Amadeus Cavalera team up with Khemmis drummer Zach Coleman in Go Ahead and Die. The trio’s self-titled debut is a rip-roaring combination of thrash, punk, and proto-death metal steeped in scathing sociopolitical commentary and horror-fiction overtones. “I really just wanted to do something with my dad,” Igor tells Apple Music. “I know it sounds cheesy, but we’ve long bonded over metal and I’d say that’s a big foundation of our relationship. And we both wanted to do something really extreme.” Below, Igor comments on each track. “Truckload Full of Bodies” “We definitely took inspiration from the pandemic for this one. Lyrically, it’s about the disease itself and the actual symptoms—the shortness of breath and stuff. The song describes overfilled hospitals, where they’re just starting to toss people into trucks because they don’t know what to do with them anymore. I got the inspiration from a picture from Italy. They got hit hard with COVID at the beginning, and there were photos of freight trucks with body bags in them.” “Toxic Freedom” “Like the pandemic, police brutality is a global issue. A big thing to us on this record was to try to hit on things that are affecting everybody around the world. It’s no secret that police brutality goes on in America—especially after the murder of George Floyd. But my father grew up in Brazil, which is a very, very corrupt police state. My mother’s side of the family is from Russia, and some of our relatives did time for speaking out against Stalin back in the day. So, it’s really just a call to arms, sort of waving the flag and saying we’re allies.” “I.C.E. Cage” “This one is a little more specific to America. It’s talking about how Immigration [and Customs] Enforcement are putting people in cages and tearing families apart. Last year, when we were writing the song, about 1,500 of these people had gone missing, and we were incredibly mad about it. My wife is Latinx, and her family got deported in the early 2000s, so she’s been struggling with this for a long time. Like police brutality, people try to construe it as a political thing, but it’s really about human rights.” “Isolated/Desolated” “For the title, we used a little bit of an old-school vibe with the slash in the middle, but the lyrical inspiration came from Stephen King’s The Shining. The main character, Jack Torrance, loses his mind in isolation—but we applied it to the modern-day quarantine. It’s basically about the madness and anxiety of being in your house all day and maybe hearing voices in your head.” “Prophets Prey” “If I was to compare this to anything, it would be ‘Religious Cancer’ from the Nailbomb album Point Blank. It’s not an anti-religious song, but it is anti-abuse in religion. It’s against the grooming of people to very radical forms of religion, and it’s about how religion can be used in harmful ways. When we wrote it, I had recently seen the movie Mandy with Nicolas Cage, so the song even dives into drug use and the acid-cult type of religions.” “Punisher” “This one dives into mass shootings around the world. Obviously, in America we’re a little more used to them and maybe desensitized, but they do go on in other countries as well. The song is asking what kind of sick animal goes out and kills children and innocent people in a shopping mall or movie theater or a school? What did these people do to deserve death? These shooters might think they’re like Punisher, the comic book hero. They think they’re fighting back against something. But in reality, they’re killing innocent people.” “El Cuco” “My dad watched The Outsider last year, but I read the book a couple years earlier, because I’m a horror nerd and I buy any new Stephen King as soon as it comes out. El Cuco comes from Spanish folklore and has a couple of different names, like Skin Changer or Boogeyman, which is what the book talks about. But the song is about victims of abuse—sexual abuse, mental abuse, anything like that. We used the fictional story of El Cuco to talk about something going on in the real world.” “G.A.A.D.” “In the time-honored tradition of Black Sabbath putting the song ‘Black Sabbath’ on the album Black Sabbath, we wanted to have our own. Lyrically, it’s about the people who decide if we live or die. At any moment, the people in power can kill us all with nuclear weapons or just abandon us in times of crisis like the pandemic, like, ‘Go ahead and die.’ So, it’s about how a small percentage of people basically decide the lives of billions.” “Worth Less Than Piss” “I think anyone who hears the title makes a sour face, but this is an old-fashioned, punk rock anti-corporation song. It’s about modern-day slavery, like sweatshops and corporations that pollute and steal water. These companies abuse and take advantage of Third World countries. ‘Worth Less Than Piss’ refers to how they treat their employees—these children making shoes in sweatshops. There’s nothing wrong with these companies existing, if they’re paying people fairly and sourcing materials the right way and not dumping their waste horribly.” “(In The) Slaughterline” “While the last song hits on the corporations that are exploiting people, ‘(In The) Slaughterline’ is about the consumers—the people in line on Black Friday at 5 in the morning. It’s a song against being materialistic and supporting this type of crap. The people waiting to buy these products are in the slaughterline—they’re contributing to exploitation just to consume some product.” “Roadkill” “This one comes from a personal place. One of my best friends was homeless at one point. He’s such an amazing dude who never deserved that. It’s a struggle that’s hard to imagine until you see someone close to you dealing with it. Homelessness is a serious issue, and the worst part is it’s an issue that can be resolved. But nobody cares about keeping people alive—they only care about making more money. So, we leave them in the street like roadkill.”

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