When System of a Down played their final show in São Paulo during their South American tour in May, videos from the concert went viral: Plumes of smoke, raging fires, massive mosh pits, and thousands of people filled the explosive videos as the GRAMMY-winning band played on stage.
On Instagram, the group posted footage of the concert and wrote, "This is not a war zone, this is not a riot, this is a System Of A Down style rock and roll concert in Brazil!!!!!!!"
For Max Cavalera, co-founder of the pioneering Brazilian metal band Sepultura — and vocalist for bands Soulfly and Cavalera Conspiracy — the magnitude of the witnessed chaos does not surprise him.
"Some of the most memorable shows to me have been [in] Argentina, Brazil, Chile and then of course, Central America," he tells GRAMMY.com. "You put together the oppression of the country, the poverty, and once they're out in a show, they're gonna let it all out, and that's why you see fires and s— like that that you normally would not see at a regular show. It's almost like the concert gives them permission to let all that out."
Cavalera's point is supported by the research and writings of Dr. Nelson Varas-Díaz, a professor of global and sociocultural studies at Florida International University. Dr. Varas-Díaz is a metal fan who's written books and academic articles on the genre, including Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America and Seeing Metal Music in Latin America and the Caribbean, the latter co-written with Dr. Daniel Nevárez Araújo. In his work, Dr. Varas-Díaz traces the evolution of metal in Latin American countries to reveal how the genre has been used as a creative tool of expression to critically challenge the legacy of colonialism and subvert systemic oppression.
He says the crowd's reaction at the System of a Down concert ultimately underscores the importance of heavy metal in the region. But in order to deconstruct the phenomenon and understand why the music has had such a significant impact there, he says it's critical to recognize the heterogeneity of Latin American countries and key differences in their histories.
"Whenever the Global North thinks about Latin America or tries to conceptualize metal in Latin America, they think about the region as this uniform whole … they think about it as one thing," he tells GRAMMY.com. "But Latin America is a collection of different countries, and each one has their own particular history: cultural, political. Those dynamics are very different, and they yield themselves for different ways in which metal began in those scenes or changed in those settings."
The Birth Of A Global Metal Scene
The origins of metal can be traced back to the late 1960s when English bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple fused blues and rock to create a more aggressive and heavier sound. When Black Sabbath released their self-titled 1970 debut album, they cultivated an influential style, which inspired countless bands, and by the mid-'70s, a new class of metal bands known as the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) had been birthed, with bands like Iron Maiden, Venom, Diamond Head, and others leading the sound. By the '80s, metal continued to evolve, and subgenres like thrash came to fruition, powered by the fast sounds of American bands like Metallica and Megadeth.
Despite the genre's predominant evolution in Europe, Dr. Varas-Díaz says there's a misconception that heavy metal arrived in Latin American countries much later than it did in the United States or other regions. He says that as bands were releasing music and cultivating various subgenres of metal, fans in Latin American countries were aware of these developments as they were unfolding.
"During the '80s, for example, the references of metal music that emanated from the Global North were kind of universal. If you were in any country in Latin America during the '80s, you were aware of the sheer number of bands that were coming out of Europe and the United States," he says. "So, there was a moment at the very onset of this huge, booming popularity where you could talk to people from different countries and we were consuming the same things."
This is true for Cavalera, who says that in 1981, Queen were touring for their album The Game when they made a pit stop in Brazil where he and his brother Igor witnessed the British rock band for the first time. He says the concert was life-changing, and it immediately introduced Cavalera and his brother to other hard rock and metal bands.
"Me and Igor became rock and rollers overnight right after that," he says. "We bought cassette tapes of Queen and Kiss, and then we just wanted to know more bands like that, so we got into Judas Priest, Van Halen, and got more into other bands. But yeah, Queen was the gateway band."
In 1984, Cavalera went on to create Sepultura with his brother, and initially, their music emulated the bands they were most inspired by. The Sepultura frontman says they even decided to write their lyrics in English instead of Portuguese in an attempt to reach more metal fans beyond the borders of Brazil.
"For us as kids, our influences were more of the American and European bands; we wanted to sound like them. The only difference is, within a couple of years, we kind of realized that it's cool to sound like your heroes, but it's also very important to find your own voice and be original," Cavalera says.
Turning Poverty & Oppression Into Metal Music
Sepultura's quest for originality is one that many early Latin American metal bands were also experiencing as they began to rise across the region.
"There's a lot of people who believe that Latin Americans consumed metal music from the Global North in a passive manner, like we are receiving the bands from the north and we're just consuming them and imitating them, right?" Dr. Varas-Díaz says. "And there's some level of imitation early on, but the sheer speed at which metal music in Latin America is transformed through this Latin American filter that makes it sound different, integrates different instruments, is visually different from the Global North, and talks about different topics than metal in the Global North, that was almost immediate."
According to Dr. Varas-Díaz, many bands in Latin America were releasing similarly styled music concurrent to bands in the Global North. For example, in 1981, when Iron Maiden released Killers, the Argentine band Riff released Ruedas de Metal ("Wheels of Metal"), and in 1983, when Metallica's Kill 'Em All debuted, Arkangel in Venezuela released Represión Latinoamericana ("Latin American Repression").
Though the music is not exactly alike, these same-year releases show that bands were taking inspiration from the same source material and producing stylistically similar sounds while instilling their own unique cultural elements. Dr. Varas-Díaz says many bands from Latin America innovated the genre by incorporating their own political and socioeconomic histories, regional instruments, and different languages.
"This was not, 'Let's wait and consume.' This thing reached Latin America and was immediately transformed," the metal author says.
In Sepultura's case, that transformation began to occur through their lyrics, when the band started writing more political music reflective of their environment in Brazil. Cavalera says that in his country, poverty, corrupt governments and oppression afflicted Brazilians, and in the aftermath of the country's military dictatorship — which began with the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, when military forces overthrew the president — generations like his continued to feel the ramifications of the country's deeply troubled history.
"We actually grew up later, but we remember this dictatorship. We know the stories of people being tortured in jails and the military coups and all that stuff. That was very, very fresh in our minds," he says. "We had all those military years of oppression, and we were scared to death of the police. All those things were real, and we grew up with all those elements, so I think all that really blended into the music and in the lyrics of the records."
Sepultura's 1993 album Chaos A.D. signaled Cavalera's musical departure from earlier albums and showcased his pursuit to create something original and authentic to his experience growing up in Brazil.
"There's a huge change in my lyrics when you talk about records like Beneath the Remains and Arise and then Chaos A.D. Chaos A.D. was fully aware of social issues. That's why I wrote stuff like "Refuse/Resist" and "Propaganda" and "Clenched Fist"; those are high-powered social issues," he says.
Even before Sepultura's 1993 release, however, many Latin American bands were already writing about their lived experiences under dictatorships or corrupt governments. According to Dr. Varas-Díaz, Colombian band Masacre was singing about the waves of violence in the region, Brazil's Ratos de Porão was writing about the burning of the Amazon, Argentina's Hermética was singing about police brutality against impoverished people, and in Chile, Warpath was writing about the Chilean dictatorship.
"While the Global North was singing about the problems of modernity like war, poverty — but singing about it in a very general manner — Latin Americans were thinking about the same thing in a very regional manner. So, it wasn't war like Sodom would write about war, or like Megadeth would write about war. [Instead,] it was the armed conflict in Peru, it was the armed conflict in Guatemala — it's very specific to the setting, to the region," he says.
Dr. Varas-Díaz believes that Argentina in particular — because of its storied political history and the bands that resulted from it — cultivated one of the most important metal scenes to ever materialize out of Latin America.
"It's a scene that was very organized from the beginning and had its own stamp of difference … there's this very working-class ethos in the way that the initial bands in Argentina conceptualized metal. If you think about Hermética's Acido Argentino, it's a very Argentinean [metal] album," he says. "This is a scene that very rapidly created its own narrative, like, 'This is who we are, this is what we sing about.' And it was a very working-class type of narrative, very anti-government, reflective of the dictatorship, reflective of the killing of Indigenous peoples in the country and addressing those topics early on."
Culture, Heritage & Latinidad Are Metal
Although the political upheaval that marred many Latin American countries was a dominant force that heavily imbued the music that emerged from those areas, culture and heritage were also critical factors in the regional transformation of metal. Many bands incorporated traditional instruments native to their countries, like Peru's Kranium, whose music includes Andean instruments like the charango and the zampoña.
"What we know today as folk metal in Latin America we owe in great part to Kranium in Peru, who started using local instrumentation years before actually recording and releasing them," Dr. Varas-Díaz says.
Cavalera amalgamated his own culture with metal when he connected with his Brazilian heritage for Sepultura's 1996 seminal album Roots, which incorporated traditional elements from famed Brazilian percussionist Carlinhos Brown and featured the native Xavante tribe from Brazil's eastern state of Mato Grosso. Even now, Cavalera continues to infuse Indigenous themes into the genre with Soulfly's new album Chama — Portuguese for "flame" — released earlier this month.
"The cover is actually Apache warriors from the Navajo reservation in Arizona, and it's bridging my Brazilian roots with the Amazon all the way to the deserts of Arizona," Cavalera, who lives in Arizona, says.
Meanwhile, contemporary Latin American bands have continued to build on the music of their predecessors while championing their cultural identity through the genre. Crisálida, a metal and progressive rock band from Chile, say they merge their influences from bands like Leprous and Teserract with the musical traditions of Chilean folk artists like Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, and Quilapayún. The latter are part of the nueva canción chilena genre, a type of folk music that spread throughout Latin America in the '60s and '70s and became associated with leftist political movements.
For Crisálida's vocalist, Cinthia Santibáñez, the influence of the nueva canción chilena genre proved to be the most impactful vehicle for telling Chile's cultural stories through the band's music.
"I sing the stories of my country, of what I feel is South American. My way of thinking centers on Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile," Santibáñez told GRAMMY.com in an interview in Spanish. "I was born in this land, I want to talk about my land."
Crisálida bassist Braulio Aspé adds, "Music is art, and it's an expression from the soul, from our hearts, and that's why we don't want to do general heavy metal. We want to use our musical roots from here and we want to write about our history."
The band uses their music to explore the folklore from their homeland. Their 2024 album Niños Dioses ("Child Gods") spotlights the Capacocha ritual of the Inca empire, in which children made long treks into the Andes Mountains to be ultimately sacrificed to the gods. Aspé says the album has a "very powerful cultural context" and that Santibañez focused on conceptualizing the perspectives of the sacrificed children and their families.
"The instrumentation is very strong, very powerful, but also very soft. We worked a lot on the dynamics and dedicate this album to the children," Santibañez says.
Dr. Varas-Díaz appreciates the contributions of bands like Crisálida to the metal genre, and he believes that bands from Latin America have ultimately made a profound impact on the worldwide metal scene. The phenomenon goes beyond simply hosting large concerts — bands from this region have created a lasting, influential legacy.
"When you think about metal in Latin America, instead of thinking about, 'Oh, the crowds are huge,' what we should be thinking about is, 'How has Latin America transformed metal from the Global North?' Because that's the main contribution that Latin America has done for metal music in the Global North," Dr. Varas-Díaz reflects. "It integrated it, transformed it, and then put it out there in a completely different way, reflecting its cultural context and historical experiences."