Arise

Recorded at Morrisound in Tampa, with Scott Burns producing and engineering. He had come to Brazil for Beneath the Remains, and this time the band came to his studio. Roadrunner granted a budget of $40,000, which let Igor Cavalera and Burns spend a week testing drum tunings and microphone positions. Andy Wallace mixed it at Quantum Sound Studios in Jersey City. Roadrunner's Monte Conner said that was where their relationship with Wallace began, and it carried on through Chaos A.D. and Roots.

Kisser said the album took much the same direction as its predecessor, but the pace eased and Igor began using groove-laden rhythms. Industrial touches appear in samples and sound effects, and Altered State is where Latin percussion and tribal drumming first show up in their music. Subtraction and Desperate Cry show the band's old love of hardcore punk. Three singles came from it: the title track, Dead Embryonic Cells and Under Siege (Regnum Irae). Max said in 2019 that when he and Igor played the album live they dropped Subtraction and Meaningless Movements, which he called fillers.

It entered the Billboard 200 at 145 and peaked at 119. It went gold in Indonesia in 1992 for 25,000 copies and silver in the UK in 2001. Select gave it five out of five, calling it a classic example of rock music as pure cathartic release. Q wrote in 1996 that it remained their thrash high-water mark. Decibel, inducting it into its Hall of Fame in 2016, quoted Kisser calling it the seed that exploded on Roots. Revolver wrote that they never thrashed harder.