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Eloy Casagrande: the Brazilian drummer who left Sepultura's farewell tour and now drives Slipknot's "Arsenal"

photo: Stefan Brending (2eight), CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Wikimedia Commons

Eloy Casagrande: the Brazilian drummer who left Sepultura's farewell tour and now drives Slipknot's "Arsenal"

Slipknot released “Arsenal” on 9 September 2026, its first new song in more than three years. The man behind the kit spent thirteen years in the seat Igor Cavalera made famous, and he left it days before Sepultura’s last rehearsal.

This is about the chair

Most of what got written about Eloy Casagrande in 2024 was about the exit. Fair enough. Walking out on a farewell tour is a story. But the exit is the least interesting thing about him, and it is over. What is still running is a line that starts in Belo Horizonte in the mid eighties, passes through São Paulo, and now sits in Iowa’s most famous band at the exact moment that band is rebuilding itself.

This is a piece about a drum stool. Who sat on it, who sat on it next, and why a kid from São Paulo state ended up holding down the biggest metal band in the United States.

A prodigy with a paper trail

Casagrande was born on 29 January 1991 in Santo André, in greater São Paulo. The awards started early. At thirteen he won the Batuka International Drummer Fest (2004). The following year he took Modern Drummer’s Undiscovered Drummer Contest, held in New Jersey. Still a teenager, he was already playing with Andre Matos and with Gloria.

That is a résumé most drummers do not have at thirty. He had it before he could legally drink in the country that gave him the trophy.

The Sepultura seat, and who actually handed it over

The shorthand around this seat is sloppy, so the dates matter. Igor Cavalera played drums in Sepultura from the band’s start in 1984 until he left in 2006. Jean Dolabella took the seat from 2006 to 2011. Casagrande joined in November 2011, at twenty years old, replacing Dolabella.

So no, he did not succeed Igor directly. Anyone who tells you otherwise has skipped five years and a whole drummer. What is true is that the seat itself belonged to Igor for two decades, and for the Sepultura audience that seat has a weight no roster change removes. Casagrande sat in it for thirteen years, which is more than Dolabella and more than most people expected from a twenty year old.

Those thirteen years covered the most orchestral, technical stretch of the Andreas Kisser and Derrick Green era. If you have heard Sepultura with a full orchestra behind them, that is Casagrande’s tenure.

February 2024: days before the first rehearsal

In December 2023 Sepultura announced a farewell tour called “Celebrating Life Through Death”. Forty years, eighteen months on the road, and the band described it as a conscious and planned death. The plan was public and the dates were selling.

Then, per the band’s own statement (published 27 February 2024 and reproduced by Blabbermouth): “On February 6th a few days prior to the first rehearsal, drummer Eloy Casagrande informed the band that he was leaving SEPULTURA.”

The next line is the one people remember: “The band were taken by surprise, without prior warning, he immediately left the band, abandoning everything related to SEPULTURA.”

The timing is the band’s own wording: days before the first rehearsal. Greyson Nekrutman, then of Suicidal Tendencies, took the stool for the farewell run. The tour happened. Sepultura did its planned death without the drummer who had been there for a third of its life.

April 2024: the white mask

Two months later the “other project” got a name. In April 2024 Slipknot confirmed Casagrande as its drummer, replacing Jay Weinberg. His first show with the band was on 25 April 2024 at Pappy & Harriet’s in California, a small room for a band that usually plays arenas.

By May, Slipknot said it had already recorded a song with him, “Long May You Die”. Whether that track ever got a proper release is murkier than it should be, so I will keep to what Loudwire wrote about “Arsenal”: the first new music since the band began working with Casagrande.

Then there is the mask. Jim Root has said Joey Jordison was a huge influence on Casagrande, and the white base of the new mask is a tribute to Jordison, with elements drawn from Brazil’s indigenous peoples. Casagrande’s own line on it, to Drumming News Network in November 2024: “Dude, I already have a bullet in my head, I’m already dead. Nothing I do now will change anything.”

It works as a joke about the mask. It also sounds like a man who had just burned a thirteen year bridge and knew it.

At the end of 2024, Modern Drummer’s readers voted him Best Metal Drummer. The magazine that gave him a contest win at fourteen gave him the big one at thirty three.

September 2026: “Arsenal”, and a smaller Slipknot

Slipknot’s last album was The End, So Far, from September 2022, and the last new song was “Bone Church” in February 2023. Three and a half years of silence. In between, the lineup thinned. Craig Jones left in 2023. In the summer of 2026 the band announced, in one sentence, that “Effective immediately, Slipknot will no longer be associated with Sid Wilson.”

So “Arsenal”, released on 9 September 2026 through the band’s own (sic)est Records, is the first Slipknot studio track without Wilson and Jones, and the first with Casagrande behind the kit. Matt Wallace produced it. M. Shawn Crahan directed the video, with actor Jackson White in front of the camera. The track opens on a spoken word passage that quotes the Beastie Boys, which is a strange and good way for a band this heavy to walk back into the room.

Jim Root told Loudwire there are “at least like 50 arrangements already being worked on.” There is no album title and no date yet, but the engine is running, and the engine is Brazilian.

The line, drawn out

The losses add up. Joey Jordison, gone from the band in 2013 and gone from the world in 2021. Paul Gray, 2010. Chris Fehn, 2019. Craig Jones, 2023. Sid Wilson, 2026. Nine became seven. A band built on the idea of a mob is now a much smaller mob, and the new heartbeat is a drummer who, by Jim Root’s account, grew up on Jordison’s records, wears a white mask in his honour, and came out of the same country that gave the world Arise and Chaos A.D.

That is the connection. Sepultura exported a way of playing heavy music in the nineties: Brazilian and physical. The band that most obviously carried that torch in the US was Slipknot, a group that owed as much to percussion as to guitars. Thirty years later, the Sepultura seat’s longest occupant after Igor is the person holding Slipknot together.

And there is one detail that only lands if you put both calendars side by side. In 2024 Sepultura was touring its own “conscious and planned death”. In the same spring, Slipknot announced a song with its new drummer called “Long May You Die”. Two bands and one drummer, both talking about death in the same season, and he crossed from one to the other in the middle of it.

The thread to pull next

The obvious follow up is Nekrutman. Suicidal Tendencies to Sepultura’s last tour is its own lineage, and it runs through a different American city with a different kind of heavy. But the question I actually want answered is simpler: how many drummers have sat in both a Brazilian metal band and an American one at the top level, and did any of them do it before Casagrande? I keep coming up short.

If you have a name, bring it to @realrocklab on Threads or X.

Sources

In this web: Sepultura · Slipknot · Eloy Casagrande · Igor Cavalera · Joey Jordison