While retiring in the coming October with a final blowout gig in their homeland Brazil, Sepultura announced a new EP on Thursday with a single drop to accompany it.
The EP, entitled ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, will be released on 24 April through Nuclear Blast records. This will be the band’s first release since 2020’s ‘Quadra’ album, having announced that they were retiring in 2023 but not as of yet ending touring.
The single, ‘The Place’, was released alongside the EP’s announcement. The track features a distant, almost post-metal gloss before a punishing riff kicks in at around the four minute mark, a reminder of the power the Brazilian pioneers can pack. The song follows a distinct concept. As singer Derrick Green said of the track, “this song deals with immigrants who have come to a place seeking refuge and start a new life.” He added that “I feel the lyrics truly follow the transitions of the song.”
In many ways, it is fitting for Sepultura to be ending their career on an experimental note seeing as this is what they were best known for at their height in the post-thrash 1990s. Having been one of the first bands to push extreme metal to its blackened limits in the 1980s, they made an effort to continually reinvent, incorporating a groove-laden sound on subsequent albums and mixing tribal elements with nü-metal on their 1996 release ‘Roots’.
The news of the band’s retirement has not been without controversy. Some have voiced confusion at the band supposedly playing their last shows on UK soil in Manchester and London, before being announced for Bloodstock this year. Others have critiqued the lineup arrangements, the only original member at this moment being bassist Paulo Jr.
This particular issue with the lineup has been intensified by former frontman Max Cavalera, and his brother, ex-Sepultura drummer Igor, touring in recent years as Cavalera Conspiracy and playing Sepultura albums the whole way through, like they did with innovative 1993 groove metal album ‘Chaos A.D.’ in 2025. They even went as far as to re-record Sepultura’s debut EP, the raw ‘Bestial Devastation’, and album, ‘Morbid Visions’, initially released in 1986.
Longtime Sepultura guitarist Andreas Kisser has said that he is comfortable with playing with the Cavalera brothers again at their final gig in São Paulo, where he’s declared he wants to put on a ‘SepulFest’ to commemorate the band’s career. He said that “it’s totally irrelevant to discuss the past, who is right, who is wrong. We’re never gonna get to a point — we’re gonna have two different views of it, and that’s fine. This is irrelevant. Let’s jam for the fans, to ourselves, to our families [who had] never seen us together.”
