May 28th: Sepultura's Celebration of Life Through Death Tour
- Tim McShane
- May 29
- 9 min read
Updated: May 31
Fermented Metal — Field Report
I started my East Bay visit to see the Sepultura's "Celebration of Life Through Death" tour...
...early in the afternoon, stopping by Almanac Brewing in the Ghost Town neighborhood of Oakland. I ordered a nice black lager called “Friday the 13th,” played a couple rounds of Jaws and Godzilla pinball, then stepped outside to finish my beer — and found a tombstone in the patio with the name “Joan Crawford” carved into it. On closer inspection, the Blue Öyster Cult symbol was etched right under the name. I asked the bartender about it and we ended up trading trivia: she didn’t know the symbol was BÖC’s, and I didn’t know the rails located a few feet away from the brewery used to haul the stone that became the headstones for that whole part of town. Ghost Town — they made the coffins and the gravestones. Cheery. Totally metal. Maybe a little on par for seeing a band's farewell tour?
Next stop: Ghost Town Brewing for a pint of “Dark Chapter” Czech dark lager. I sat there watching the projected 80's classic horror movie “Wax Works,” admiring the decor, then chased it with a “Helles Awaits,” two games of Addams Family, and a round of Iron Maiden pinball. Next time I’m getting a shirt there....
Next stop: Ghost Town Brewing for a pint of “Dark Chapter” Czech dark lager. I sat there watching the projected 80's classic horror movie “Wax Works,” admiring the decor, then chased it with a “Helles Awaits,” two games of Addams Family, and a round of Iron Maiden pinball. Next time I’m getting a shirt there....
A Lyft up to the UC Theatre dropped me into a line of battle jackets stretching halfway down the block, as the doors were just opening at 5:30. I ducked around the corner to Spats for a quick game of Medieval Madness before the gates opened.
Tribal Gaze
Drink bracelet on, beer in hand, I got to the floor right as Longview, Texas death-metallers Tribal Gaze kicked off the night. Vocalist McKenna Holland prowled the stage like he was looking for a fight, and the pit obliged. Backed by guitarists Quintin Stauts and Ian Kilmer, bassist Zachary Denton, and drummer Cesar “Ceezbone” De Los Santos, the band drew from their 2022 debut LP The Nine Choirs (Maggot Stomp) and last year’s Nuclear Blast follow-up Inveighing Brilliance. Tribal Gaze are still touring-circuit kids next to the legends sharing the bill, and they played like they knew it — and like they didn’t care.
Biohazard
Next, a real privilege: Brooklyn’s Biohazard, back in their reunited classic-era lineup of Billy Graziadei (vocals/guitar), Bobby Hambel (guitar), Evan Seinfeld (vocals/bass), and Danny Schuler (drums). The four original-era members regrouped in 2022 and have toured steadily since 2023. Their slot leaned on Urban Discipline (1992) and State of the World Address (1994), with “Punishment,” “Shades of Grey,” and “Tales from the Hard Side” landing hardest.
For a man in his late 50's, Evan Seinfeld didn’t look like the years had laid a hand on him — singing, pounding the bass, jumping up and down the whole set; the guy clearly keeps himself in shape. He taunted the crowd for not having half the energy of a Jersey audience, then whipped them into a frenzy anyway. Great to see the original lineup back on stage together.
Ghost Tequila and Biohazard
Ghost Tequila, the ghost-pepper-infused 100% blue agave spirit marketed as "The Perfectly Spicy®," has a direct line into the world of New York hardcore through Biohazard guitarist and vocalist Billy Graziadei.
The brand itself was founded by Chris Moran, who first developed a ghost-pepper tequila shot while bartending at a Boston tequila bar in 2011. Moran later partnered with industry veteran David Gordon to scale the recipe into a national brand. The connection to Biohazard came years later: in September 2022, Graziadei — a founding member of Biohazard since 1988 — joined Ghost Tequila in the officially titled role of "Brand Badass," handling music-industry partnerships, artist relations, and on-the-ground brand presence at venues, festivals, and tours.
The fit is logical. Biohazard reunited its classic lineup in 2022, the same year Graziadei signed on with Ghost, and resumed touring in 2023. That return to the road dovetailed with Ghost Tequila's push into the live-music space, which has since included partnerships with Citizens House of Blues Boston and MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Graziadei serves as a bridge between the spirit and the heavier end of the live-music ecosystem the brand wants to reach.
For a magazine that lives at the intersection of metal and fermentation, the takeaway is clean: a Brooklyn hardcore lifer is putting his name behind a Boston-born chili-pepper tequila, and using his road experience to plug it into the venues his own band plays.
After Biohazard, I ducked back over to Spats for a cocktail and to rest my dogs before the second half. Coming back, I noticed the merch line hadn’t shortened — it had actually stretched farther down the hall.
The crowd was a beautiful cross-section: cynical and happy 60-year-old first-generation rockers, weekend metalheads, thrashers, face-painted and heavily garbed teenagers, and kids as young as seven or eight. The little ones were pointing out the merch shirts to their parents — grotesque monsters and skulls, eye candy for the fevered imagination of youth.
And then Exodus took the stage....
Exodus
The Bay Area thrash legends had the hometown advantage, and they used it. The current lineup — founding guitarist Gary Holt, longtime guitarist Lee Altus, bassist Jack Gibson, drummer Tom Hunting, and vocalist Rob Dukes, who rejoined in 2025 after an 11-year absence — is touring behind their 2026 album Goliath, the band’s first studio record since Dukes returned to the mic.
Late in the set, a masked figure swapped in for Lee Altus, kitted out in the wild-hair-and-mask getup of Wrex, Exodus’ mascot. Turned out to be Steve Brogden, Gary Holt’s guitar tech, taking a turn under the lights.
During the closer, “Strike of the Beast,” a long-haired kid named Hanns got lifted out of the crowd and invited onstage by Altus to play part of the song; the kid and his dad have apparently had previous interactions with the band. The whole bit drew the biggest grin of the night out of Holt.
Great fucking set! Welcome home, Exodus.
Headliner: Sepultura’s Berkeley Farewell
Sepultura’s current lineup — Derrick Green on vocals, Andreas Kisser on guitar, Paulo Jr. on bass, and Greyson Nekrutman on drums — is not a nostalgia act pretending time stopped in 1996. It is the final working version of a band that has survived reinvention, controversy, lineup changes, and the impossible burden of its own legacy. Green, Kisser, and Paulo Jr. anchor the frame; Nekrutman, just 23, now occupies one of the most scrutinized drum chairs in modern metal.
The Setlist
The 21-entry setlist, as documented on setlist.fm and tour aggregators after the show, deliberately spanned the band's entire catalog — Schizophrenia, Beneath the Remains, Arise, Chaos A.D., Roots, Against, Kairos, Quadra, and the April 2026 farewell EP The Cloud of Unknowing:
1. Beneath the Remains (Intro)
2. Inner Self
3. All Souls Rising
4. Desperate Cry
5. Kairos
6. Means to an End
7. Attitude
8. Against
9. Choke
10. The Place
11. Escape to the Void
12. Kaiowas (with percussion jam and fans pulled onstage)
13. Dead Embryonic Cells
14. Slave New World
15. Beyond the Dream
16. Territory
17. Refuse/Resist
18. Arise
19. Ratamahatta (abridged, preceded by a Nekrutman drum solo)
20. Roots Bloody Roots
What the Set Was Arguing
The most interesting thing about this setlist, viewed end-to-end, is its refusal to organize itself around any single era. The Cavalera-period anchors are all present — "Inner Self," "Desperate Cry," "Dead Embryonic Cells," "Territory," "Refuse/Resist," "Arise," "Ratamahatta," "Roots Bloody Roots" — but they're interleaved with Green-era material from Against and Kairos, and with three songs from a farewell EP that's barely a month old. The implicit argument is one that Sepultura have made in interviews for years and that fans have not always accepted: that the post-1998 catalog is part of the canon, not a separate appendix.
"Beyond the Dream" landing at track 16 — three songs from the end of a farewell show — is the clearest gesture. Sepultura could have used that slot for any number of crowd-tested classics. They chose a song from an EP released six weeks before the tour reached Berkeley, with Green leaning into a cleaner vocal approach over a Kisser solo that has more in common with the band's Quadra phase than with the Roots tracks bookending it. The placement reads as deliberate: the farewell isn't only an inventory of what the band was. It's also a final assertion of what they still are.
The opening sequence works the same way. "War Pigs" as a walk-on is a reverent nod to the Sabbath lineage that made the whole genre possible; "Beneath the Remains" as intro then bridges directly into Sepultura's own 1989 watershed. The crowd response to "Inner Self" suggested most of the room was prepared for that history. The response to "Beyond the Dream" suggested the band has earned the right to add new material to the same conversation.
The Three Pillars That Still Carry the Show
For all the catalog-spanning ambition, three songs continue to do most of the structural work in a Sepultura set:
"Territory" remains one of the band's most durable songs because it functions as both a protest march and a pit-starter. Built on a single mid-tempo chug rather than thrash velocity, it's the song that most clearly anticipates the groove-metal movement Sepultura helped instigate.
"Refuse/Resist" is the Chaos A.D. statement piece, and it survives every era because it never depended on speed. Its power comes from restraint, repetition, and the sense that the central riff is locking the crowd into a single pulse — exactly the property a farewell crowd needs.
"Arise" reaches further back into the band's sharper death-thrash period, a reminder that before Sepultura became a groove institution, they were one of the bands making extreme metal sound more global, more technical, and more dangerous. Hearing it at the UC, more than three decades after release, was the closest the show came to historical argument: this band built the bridge between Brazilian extreme metal and the international scene that absorbed it.
"Ratamahatta," "Kaiowas," and the Larger Contribution
The Kaiowas percussion jam, with fans pulled onstage, is a tour-wide ritual on this run; the Berkeley version was no exception. It's worth saying plainly why "Kaiowas" and "Ratamahatta" matter beyond the obvious crowd-pleasing function. Both songs are central to Sepultura's actual cultural contribution to heavy music: the argument, made musically rather than rhetorically, that metal could absorb regional rhythm, percussion, language, and identity without flattening any of it into novelty. Brazilian metal had existed before Sepultura. Sepultura made it impossible to ignore — and made it audible to bands from Norway to Indonesia who then ran with the permission.
"Ratamahatta," even in the abridged Berkeley version preceded by Nekrutman's drum solo, was the cleanest reminder of that legacy in the room. "Roots Bloody Roots," as the closer, remained what it has always been: blunt, communal, almost ritualistic, the unavoidable final exclamation mark.
One of the night’s strongest crossover moments came when Biohazard’s Evan Seinfeld joined Sepultura onstage for “Slave New World.” It was more than a guest appearance: Seinfeld is credited as a co-composer on the song, and his presence gave the Berkeley performance a direct bridge between Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. era and Biohazard’s New York hardcore-metal legacy. In a show already framed as a farewell, the cameo underscored how deeply Sepultura’s influence ran through the early-’90s collision of thrash, hardcore, groove, and street-level aggression.
Nekrutman, In Particular
Replacing Casagrande under normal circumstances would have been daunting; doing it on a farewell tour, with the band's entire history being audited by fans in real time, is another thing entirely. In Berkeley the drum solo slotted in just before "Ratamahatta" was not a polite gesture. It was a statement that the band is not hiding their 23-year-old behind the arrangements. The mid-set placement, surrounded by some of the most rhythmically distinctive material in Sepultura's catalog, was the test most worth watching. He passed it.
Epilogue
What made the night insightful rather than merely sentimental was the way Sepultura’s different eras rubbed against each other. The Derrick Green-era material asks fans to acknowledge the band as a living institution, not a museum of the Cavalera years. The Arise, Chaos A.D., and Roots songs carry the historical gravity. The farewell EP material argues that the final chapter is still part of the story. That tension is Sepultura’s legacy in miniature: fracture and continuity, tradition and reinvention, brutality and rhythm.
The timing gave the show a sharper edge, too. Just one day before the UC Theatre performance, Sepultura announced that their last-ever concert will take place November 7, 2026 at Mercado Livre Arena Pacaembu in São Paulo. That announcement reframed Berkeley not as another tour stop but as part of the countdown to the band’s final act.
As a writer for Fermented Metal — and a longtime fan — the larger cultural point is this: Sepultura’s farewell isn’t only about a metal band ending. It’s about a global metal institution showing how scenes travel. Brazilian metal, New York hardcore, Bay Area thrash, Texas death metal, and a Berkeley all-ages crowd all occupied the same room for one night. That is the real achievement of Sepultura’s career. The band didn’t just export Brazilian heaviness; they helped make metal feel less US- and Euro-centric and more genuinely worldly.
The Berkeley performance was not a wake. It was a last call with the amps still hot — a celebration of life through death, exactly as advertised.
Obrigado!
See Sepultura's whole set
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