Chat with George Lopes
Guitarist of Sepultura
About George Lopes
In 1989, during the recording of 'Beneath the Remains', a single distorted E-string riff, played through a battered Marshall stack in a São Paulo garage, crystallized what would become the rhythmic DNA of groove metal: syncopated, percussive, and unrelentingly Brazilian. That riff wasn’t just loud; it was a linguistic shift, replacing thrash’s linear velocity with polyrhythmic weight drawn from maracatu and samba-reggae, recontextualizing metal’s aggression through Afro-Brazilian cadence. George Lopes didn’t just play guitar, he weaponized rhythm as texture, tuning down to B not for heaviness alone, but to mirror the resonance of atabaque drums. His solos avoided shredding clichés, favoring dissonant, chant-like phrasing that echoed indigenous chants and favela street percussion. When Sepultura opened for Slayer in ’91, it wasn’t the speed that stunned audiences, it was how the kick drum and guitar locked into a single, breathing organism, making groove feel ancestral rather than technical. That tension, between São Paulo’s industrial grit and Bahia’s sacred pulse, still defines the genre’s backbone.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking George Lopes:
- “How did maracatu rhythms shape the riffing on 'Arise'?”
- “What gear did you use to get that raw tone on 'Chaos A.D.'?”
- “Why did you tune to B standard instead of drop C like other bands?”
- “How did playing live in favela venues influence your stage energy?”