A Brazilian band records a second album in a small studio in Belo Horizonte, and by the time it reaches record shops in Europe and North America, the people who released it have never seen the band perform. That band was Sepultura, and the record was Schizophrenia, released on October 30, 1987.
The album arrived just over a year after Morbid Visions, which leaned hard into black metal's raw, lo-fi murk. Schizophrenia moved decisively toward thrash and death metal, a sharper and more aggressive sound that owed much to the group's newest member.
Kisser's arrival and the new sound
Guitarist Andreas Kisser had joined Sepultura in 1987, bringing with him a love of traditional heavy metal and a more melodic approach. Max Cavalera and Kisser wrote all the lyrics together, and the music was credited to the band as a whole. The result was a record that felt tighter and more deliberate than anything Sepultura had done before.
The recording took place in August 1987 at J. G. Estudio in Belo Horizonte, with the band and Tarso Senra producing. Cogumelo Records handled the Brazilian release, but it was Roadrunner Records that took Schizophrenia to the rest of the world, signing Sepultura without ever seeing a live show. Club owners in the United States were afraid to book the group because of their style; the band resorted to mailing playlists to radio stations when concerts were hard to arrange. The album's cover art, created by Ibsen Otoni, drew inspiration from two classic records: Scorpions' Blackout and Anthrax's Spreading the Disease. That visual nod to established metal acts matched the band's growing ambition.
Synthesizers, violin and outside writing
Schizophrenia also stretched beyond the standard thrash template. Two instrumentals broke up the attack: 'Inquisition Symphony' was the album's longest instrumental, while 'The Abyss' lasted just over a minute. Henrique Portugal added synthesizers, and Paulo Gordo played violin, touches that gave the album an unexpected depth. The original edition ran 37 minutes, compact enough to keep its intensity from wearing thin. The track "To the Wall" carried lyrics by Vladimir Korg, the only outside writing credit on the album.
The writing credits hid a quieter story. Paulo Junior was listed as the bass guitarist, but he did not actually play on the record. The bass parts were apparently performed by Andreas Kisser, though that fact never made it into the credits. It was a strange piece of studio history, but it did nothing to slow the album's momentum. Schizophrenia kept finding new life long after its original release. In 1990 it was reissued with the bonus track 'Troops of Doom', recorded in late August of that year with Scott Burns handling the mix. A remastered edition followed in 1997, adding a demo version and rough mixes of two other songs.
Paulo Junior was listed as the bass guitarist, but he did not actually play on the record.
Schizophrenia became the bridge between Sepultura's primitive beginnings and the international force they would become. The shift from black metal toward death and thrash metal, the arrival of Kisser, and the leap from a small Brazilian label to Roadrunner Records all happened on this one record. The band that mailed playlists to radio stations because no one would book them had just released an album that would define their next decade. The album's legacy continued into the 2020s. In 2022 it reached number 34 on the Portuguese album chart, a sign of its enduring pull. Two years later, Max and Igor Cavalera revisited the record under the Cavalera Conspiracy banner, releasing a full re-recording in June 2024.