SEPULTURA guitarist Andreas Kisser is featured in a new interview with Greece-based Metalpaths discussing the band's new album, The Mediator Between Head And Hands Must Be The Heart. An excerpt is available below:

Q: This is the third album without any of the Cavalera brothers performing. Do you feel as a musician and one of the original members of the band since the late '80s that the Sepultura of today have a certain connection musicwise, lyricwise or however you’d like to call it with the band that released Beneath The Remains, Arise, etc?

Andreas: "I don’t know, man, you know I don’t compare things like that at all I mean, they were just different moments and different situations and here we are almost 30 years (we’re gonna celebrate next year) and we have a really beautiful history, you know a band coming from Brazil conquering different parts of the world, and we’re still here touring the biggest festivals in the world and with a great album, with a great label, enjoying a lot of moments and stuff. There’s no need for this kind of analysis, you know I think we respect very much our past, like I said it’s a very beautiful, strong and unique history and of course we have elements from there, it’s part of ourselves."

"Me and Paulo are together in Sepultura since 1987 when I joined the band and Paulo is there from the start. So not only musical ideas and more than when Max was in the band. So we create this kind of new chemistry with new elements that we have in the band. Max left in 1996, Igor left in 2006, you know there’s 10 years of difference there. We did something different and took our time to rebuild Sepultura. Jean Dollabela stayed with us, and now we have Eloy Casagrande, we are developing Sepultura. I think that’s the spirit of Sepultura. Regardless of the formation, we had very different albums from each other, if you put Schizophrenia next to Roots with that formation, the Cavaleras, they’re very different from each other, because you know we grew up, we got married, we got kids and stuff, we moved to the States, I mean we grew up as people. And the music really changed during that, it’s natural it’s a very natural process, you know we take advantage of the changes."

Go to this location for the audio version of the interview and the complete transcript.

Sepultura recently released a video for the track 'The Vatican', featured on the band's new album, The Mediator Between Head And Hands Must Be The Heart.

In his exclusive track by track for the blog DP no estúdio com o Sepultura, Andreas Kisser described the song 'The Vatican' as “one of the tracks that has some death metal influences, whose lyrics tell the story of how the Vatican was created, filled with blood, orgy, murders, corruption, adultery... it’s one of the most evil and perverse lyrics I ever wrote.”

And the guitarist was right, 'The Vatican' is not only one of the best songs on the album, but also one of the most brutal songs in the history of Sepultura. The clip presented today, directed by Rafael Kent and Okent Films team, does justice to the melodic and lyrical context of 'The Vatican', presenting a daring, defiant, oppositional, and considering the subject matter, potentially controversial videographic record.

Andreas Kisser believes that the clip represents very well the music and lyrics. “It shows various obscure facets of the church, from corruption to pedophilia, a dark side that many people like to ignore. The actors were very well selected, all with strong and striking expressions. The video tells the story of a priest who wants to leave the church because of all this dirt, and suffers pressure from the inside not to leave. It’s rather heavy and tense”, he reported.

For the video’s director, Rafael Kent, the clip had to show, aesthetically, an environment that referred to the Catholic Church, which, in his opinion, was achieved without any need to record or reproduce a temple. “We tried to have some visuals that resembled environments from the Church but were not directly in the Church. The filming also accompanies this aesthetic; we looked for darker and more obscure scenes giving the impression that the kind of thing that happens in the clip and story are things that happen on the sly”, he said.

The video was recorded in a building in downtown São Paulo-SP and the recordings were made in less than 24 hours. “First we went after a location. In fact we had already filmed there before, Trackers, located in São Paulo. It’s an old building and has various environments. Really nice spot. We recorded in a night, we arrived at Trackers at 4pm and left in the morning. I went to bed at 6:30?, said Rafael.

The director demonstrates awareness that his video could generate controversy and be criticized, as it boldly exposes topics sensitive to the Church, and a society whose formation is grounded in Catholicism and Christianity. “The lyrics speak of how the Church dominates man’s mind, how many years of domination through faith have passed, and the bloody past of the Church... We all know dark moments in the Catholic religion. One of our concerns (or bets) was ‘let’s bet on how many places the clip will be banned’. I believe that regarding prohibition, backlash, and so on, this video clip comes with it all”, he reflected.

The director, however, seeks to justify his work, highlighting that the theme, though delicate, has been increasingly debated in the public sphere. “It is a controversial subject, but which today is part of our life and the news. How many times has the Church had to apologize before its faithful as to certain attitudes of the priesthood?” he asked.

Watch the clip and draw your own conclusions...

The Mediator Between Head And Hands Must Be The Heart is streaming in its entirety below:

BraveWords' review of The Mediator Between Head And Hands Must Be The Heart can be found at this location.

Album trailers:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3: