Richie Cavalera is a mild-mannered enough guy, but cross the Incite frontman and you might end up in one of his songs.
“I’m not a like a confrontational person in real life. Music and my lyrics are where I get back at you for what you did to me,” says the Arizona-bred vocalist whose last name should ring a bell for the heavy metal faithful — his stepfather is Max Cavalera of Sepultura, Soulfly and Cavalera Conpsiracy fame.
The thrash/groove band last week released its seventh album, “Savage New Times,” a process Cavalera calls “a culmination of excitement and nerves.
“But we know what this record is in our catalog, and we understand how good it is, in our personal opinion, and the feedback we’ve been getting. So this is the most excited I’ve ever been for an album coming out since probably my debut.”
Part of the reason for his enthusiasm about the album is its personal nature. He explains that on previous releases, he tended to “take a reflection of other people’s experiences or things I’ve seen in the world. But this one was strictly about a personal, small weight that I just had to get off my chest that was my driving force lyrically and musically.”
Despite the personal threads, “Savage New Times” might be Incite’s most collaborative album: “I think when we had the ‘Oppression’ album and the ‘Built to Destroy’ record, it was a lot of the guitar player at that time kind of forcing our hand with a lot of it. Now having Lennon [Lopez] and Layne [Richardson] writing, it’s really us. And the progression of the band is happening naturally. We just went in with wanting to make a record that was 100% us that we were all happy with. And I think that’s no doubt what we did.”
Guitarist Richardson is the newest Incite member, joining Cavalera and the longtime rhythm section of Lopez (drums) and EL (bass) in a band that the singer started 21 years ago when he was 18. By that point, he was already a seasoned headbanger, seemingly ordained for a life in metal after Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford gave baby Richie the devil horns at the Phoenix bar run by his mom, Gloria Cavalera. An early trip to Brazil, Max’s homeland, was particularly influential.
“I must have been five or six years old, and my parents took me to Brazil to see the family down there and go to the Amazon,” he recalls. “But Sepultura had a couple one-off shows in South America and I got to see those. It was right at the end of ‘Arise’ and before ‘Chaos A.D.’ I’ll just never forget the energy of the shows, standing at the soundboard, being a little kid and just being in awe of what was going on. I had already seen so much in metal, from Sacred Reich and Atrophy and those bands since I was three or four and being on the cover of Atrophy’s record, it was beginning to take hold. But I think that was more of the moment where it was like, damn, this is crazy, you know my dad’s a nut, people are going insane, this is like nothing I remember from Arizona metal shows. So that really got me fired up.”
Now hooked, the younger Cavalera was joining his dad on tour and on stage whenever he could: playing with Sepultura on its song “Policia” during a tour with Pantera and Prong; singing “This Love” with Pantera; hitting Ozzfest as a teenager.
Incite recently came off the Summer Slaughter tour, a package headlined by Hatebreed that afforded only a 20-minute slot. Up next is the Midnight in Hell Tour, led by Six Feet Under, featuring four acts. It will stop at Brooklyn Monarch on Oct. 23.
“I think something that we have to our advantage is playing so much as we have as a band, we can alternate for whatever the situation calls, whether its an hour, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, it just doesn’t matter,” Cavalera says. “Having four singles from the new record out, we were able to really bounce around between those songs while adding some of the staple songs. So it was intense. You don’t want to be that band that plays over and ruins everybody else’s shows. So for us, it was like let’s get it done. Let’s even start a minute early if we can. It was fun to get back to that and have that pressure and that rush. And now, I think coming into Six Feet Under, we’re going to be a lot more prepared, have a longer set time and start a little later.”
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