In a chat featured in the January 2025 edition of Modern Drummer, Eloy Casagrande addressed his departure from Sepultura following Andreas Kisser’s comments.
“Everything happened at the end of 2023 when I got a call from Slipknot’s manager asking me if I was interested in doing an audition for Slipknot,” the drummer said when asked about getting the call from Slipknot and how he landed the gig.
He continued, “That year, Sepultura decided to stop playing, so it was a very natural decision for me to keep playing with someone else instead of just retiring. At the end of [2023] and the beginning of [2024], I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone about that. The audition was a big secret. Nobody could know about it.”
“Sepultura didn’t even know, it was just something between me and the guys from Slipknot. It was my decision to do the audition. I said, ‘Okay, I’m interested in doing an audition because Sepultura is going to stop. I have one and a half years left of working with them and I’m going to be done,'” Casagrande revealed.
Eloy further shared in his interview, “Through the years, I have played many times with Slipknot. We shared stages when I was playing Sepultura, and that was the place that I always wanted to be. I grew up listening to their music, so I wanted to have the experience playing live with Slipknot with a mask on my face. In my first show with the band I was thinking, ‘Oh, this is really happening. Oh my god. I can’t believe it.'”
Kisser recently joined Overdrive.ie and talked about Eloy leaving to join Slipknot. When asked if the farewell tour influenced Casagrande’s decision, he replied, “I have no idea, man. You have to ask him. Because we were very surprised by his decision.”
“We were working on [the Sepultura farewell tour] for two years — with him — and three weeks before the first show, he decided to leave out of nowhere. It was really weird,” Kisser commented.
After Casagrande’s departure, Greyson Nekrutman joined Sepultura. The band is preparing for their next tour, starting March 11 in Honduras and ending March 30 at Brazil’s Lollapalooza.
