Papangu - Fusion metal for the Apocalypse

From Brazil's Northeast, more precisely from João Pessoa, come Papangu, one of the most original bands of this decade. Torn between a passion for different styles and traditions, from prog to metal by way of jazz, and devotees of giants like Magma and King Crimson, they've managed to fuse all of this with the music and culture of northeastern Brazil. The bond with their homeland is evident right from the name: "papangu" is in fact a character from the Bezerros Carnival, a traditional festival in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Let's retrace their journey through environmental apocalypses, criminal epics and celestial visions.

The nightmare of climate Apocalypse: Holoceno

The band was formed in 2012 and initially comprised Marco Mayer (bass, vocals, guitar, keyboards), Hector Ruslan (electric guitar, vocals) and Nichollas Jaques (drums, vocals). Describing their sound without the backing of actually listening to their music can be difficult. We'll turn directly to the words of Marco Mayer, gathered in an interview given to OndaRock itself: "I don't think we're necessarily a metal band. While we clearly display our influences, we're a bit wary of being boxed in by genre labels. But that doesn't mean we mix everything together as if we were making a collage of different genres [...] Our sound is more like a stew, as if you put all the things we love into a cauldron and let it simmer long enough for the ingredients to dissolve and emulsify. I'd say a more fitting description would be [...] progressive rock, and that comes with some caveats too – clearly, we're nothing like Yes or Rush, and we're not the stereotypical model of stoned rockers wearing capes and worshipping Tolkien. And even though we play heavy, complex stuff, we're nothing like Dream Theater; quite the opposite, actually. For those who haven't heard us yet, try imagining a melodic riff from bands like Clutch and Mastodon mixed with the rhythmic playfulness of Magma and mid-Seventies King Crimson, but with melodies and rhythms from northeastern Brazil". Hector Ruslan also lends a hand, adding: "You could certainly say we're a metal band, but you could also point out, just as Marco said, that we're a kind of aggressive prog-rock band".

At the start the project struggled to find financial means, so the first demos only arrived in 2016. When Marco Meyer was about to move abroad for work, in 2019, the band focused on making a debut album. Unfortunately the 2020 pandemic slowed things down. After a full seven years of gestation, Papangu arrived at their debut in 2021 with Holoceno. In the meantime, the lineup had brought in contributions from other musicians. This eccentric concept album, sung entirely in Portuguese, tells the story of a cangaceiro who has a vision of his own future and, in order to change it, resorts to a sacrifice. Things don't go as planned, the terrible prospect of an environmental disaster looms, and to avert it the protagonist attempts a pact with the devil. It's easy to read political and environmentalist subtext into this almost allegorical, Faustian tale. The musical vehicle, as extravagant as the plot itself, is a prog-rock sound with major psychedelic grafts and clear nods to Magma and the most fusion-leaning King Crimson, but toughened up by tremendous sludge metal explosions and spiced with percussion from northeastern Brazil.
"Ave-Bala" immediately twists into a spectacular, variable-speed jazz-rock that carries Mastodon or Baroness into a feverish instrumental with free-jazz reflexes. "Água Branca" brings in the voice, distant and filtered, but is remembered above all for a synth line that quotes the virtuosity of the English school, albeit recontextualized within a furious arrangement that could belong to Neurosis. "São Francisco" raises the complexity even further, making metal brutality coexist with progressive acrobatics and using a nursery rhyme as an improbable connective tissue.
The thrilling richness of this debut, split between elegance and violence, finds its fullest expression in the three extended closing tracks. First comes "Terra Arasada", which reveals a black-metal soul laid over atmospheric sludge metal, before finally reassembling into a symphonic, hallucinogenic dance. Next, "Lobisomem" unveils Pink Floyd-like melancholy and post-metal dissonance, closing with a swirling brass solo. The conclusion is entrusted to "Holoceno", which emerges from the mists of a Tangerine Dream-style cosmic vision to weave a dreamlike chant that sways until it crashes into a jazz-rock machine launched toward a terrifying climax, with free-jazz scratches, psychedelic layering and metal bombardments.
Holoceno sits in a no-man's-land inhabited by other great examples of a new way of approaching the most experimental heavy metal, one that has no trouble blurring into jazz and prog-rock to best express its own creativity. Monumental works, like "Éons" by Neptunian Maximalism or "Alphaville" by Imperial Triumphant, for which "Triangle" by Schammasch stands as a noble forerunner, are reshaping the metal avant-garde to build a catalogue of elaborate, ambitious albums capable of intriguing a broad and varied audience accustomed to demanding listens that nonetheless deliver great satisfaction. By bringing together various strands of rock and metal exploration from the Seventies through to the late Nineties, the Brazilians of Papangu join this small and prestigious group of innovators.

The criminal epic of Virgulino Ferreira da Silva: "Lampião Rei"

A substantial shift in sound accompanies the second album, Lampião Rei, released in 2024. While the debut focused on the climate crisis, this one tells the adventures, somewhere between history and legend, of the bandit Virgulino Ferreira da Silva (1897–1938). If the debut credited eight musicians plus guest Toby Driver, who contributed a remix, here they appear as a sextet with as many as five guests. The instrumentation has expanded considerably and now also includes Wurlitzer, Clavinet, a rubber chicken, the Brazilian zabumba, the Nigerian udu, a violin, congas and much more.
Scaling back the metal dosage, they let the fusion component—already clearly audible on the debut—come through forcefully, tying back to the elusive jazz musician Hermeto Pascoal, singer Edu Lobo, but also to the psychedelia of the udigrudi movement and to forró dances. These elements, which coexist with the Magma-indebted prog-rock-metal already appreciated on Holoceno, make Lampião Rei a less aggressive, more colorful but no less creative album.
The life of Lampião, bandit, or rather cangaço, of the country's Northeast (the sertão), is told from his birth up to his attainment of the status of Brazil's greatest criminal. The plan is to continue the story, reaching all the way to his death, complete with gruesome beheading, on a forthcoming album. At his peak the outlaw led a gang that grew to as many as 100 cangaceiros, with which he terrorized seven Brazilian states. A controversial and charismatic figure, responsible for hundreds of rapes and murders, he was wounded six times and still found time for a legendary love story with Maria Déia, known as Maria Bonita. The death alluded to earlier was no less extraordinary, and it contributed significantly to the end of the cangaço, the banditry of which he remains the foremost example. The choice to tell the story of this controversial folk hero, capable of great honesty and compassion but also of unbridled violence, has over the decades also captivated artists known here in Italy and as different from one another as Joan Baez, who sings of him in "O Cangaceiro" (1964), and Sepultura, who mention him in "Ratamahatta".
The album opens with the three-part composition "Acende a luz": a short, dreamy acoustic introduction, with refined vocal harmonies, leads into the weightier second part, a psychedelic prog-rock that catches fire with unexpected growl passages and an epic fusion ride complete with a long galactic solo doubled by a synth. A frenetic dance fills the final minutes, with the instruments intertwining in a vividly colorful jazz-rock inlay.
The sludge of the debut returns in the riff that drives the seven-plus minutes of "Boitatá" (a fire serpent from Brazilian folklore that attacks those who set fire to fields and forests), menacing yet also psychedelic, bitten by further growl passages always mounted on complex fusion geometries. In the finale, as a hypnotic nursery rhyme repeats across multiple voices, horns are added to the mix.
Next comes the shorter "Oferenda no alguidar", with more overt nods to Brazilian music, albeit reinforced with double-bass drumming. The brief and achingly sweet "Mulher rendeira", an electric guitar solo, splits the album in two and introduces a second half full of further surprises. "Sol raiar" finds the band interpreting Brazilian music with great elegance before returning to their atypical fusion-metal on "Maracutaia", led by piano and swept away halfway through by lengthy instrumental passages; it morphs once more into song and closes with an intense prog-metal charge, complete with a hilarious rubber chicken (!).
The final stretch is divided between "Ruínas" and "Rito de coroação", two tracks running over eight minutes. The first, instrumental, bounces off a melody to build an impressionistic tableau, then the Clavinet turns it into funk-jazz over which the horns sketch out melodies while the arrangement grows ever more creatively layered. "Rito de coroação" more explicitly reclaims the rock and metal soul, always rendered in a sophisticated, technical style that again recalls the King Crimson so present on the debut, for one last multifaceted adventure closed out by various solos and a slow fade out.

Repeating Holoceno would have been impossible, so Papangu took a different path. They wrote an unpredictable prog-rock album that borrows heavily from jazz, metal and Brazilian music, and which, once again, places them in a niche where they have few rivals.

A fusion metal dream: "Celestial"

Celestial, the third album, arrives in 2026. The trajectory is clear: from their initial mutant blend of extreme metal and progressive, they've moved toward a more elegant jazz-rock formula open to disparate contaminations. Throughout all this, the Brazilian dimension of their sound remains central, with frequent nods to ciranda and forró, traditional styles from the country's Northeast, but also more broadly to música popular brasileira (mpb).
Gentle Giant seem to be the starting point of the opening "Mau-olhado", a frenetic and colorful example of fusion reinforced with metal and anchored by a prominent Hammond organ. The dreamy "Colosso" conceals machine-gun black-metal drumming amid celestial melodies, with sweet guitar digressions and keyboard melodies. The dark aggression of old emerges above all on "Taxidermia", sung in growl, incidentally one of the tracks where the influence of King Crimson is most evident.

Two instrumental tracks, the more rollicking "Bode expiatório" and the sweeter "Celeste", lead into the psychedelic "Fechamento de corpo", with further scraps of growl and more pronounced metal elements, including an explosive closing guitar solo.
Brazilian music takes center stage instead on "Calado (de olho)", albeit set within a lively fusion frame, and "Afirmação", a dance driven by thunderous metal guitars and shimmering organ.

The exuberance of old has crystallized into elegance without entirely losing its unpredictability. Although less adventurous than the two previous chapters, and certainly less explosive and elusive, Celestial confirms the distinctiveness of a band that sounds at once respectful of the classics and capable of original reinterpretations and syntheses. A more accessible album than the (superior) previous chapters, also suitable for those who aren't especially well versed in metal.

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