It's good: Névoa – Towards Belief

There's no shortage of bands that claim a combination of metal and jazz, but so very few pull it off as well as this Portugese band does.

Often, metal bands playing jazzy musical segments – or even calmer passages in general – lack the nuance to make them sound good. But Névoa absolutely has the skill to pull off the dynamic changes on this record.

And it's not just that they actually play both the metal and jazz parts exceptionally well. It's also how they manage to have their very own sound apart from the standard metal/jazz vocabulary. They're dark, very dark, mostly pulling from atmospheric black metal, and their more jazzy passages are moody and smokey. They let their segments play out for as long as needed, but they're also good at shifting gears. This makes their music feel less monolithic than your typical black metal record, and much more like a musical adventure. And it doesn't feel hokey either: they're still heavy and doomy, and I'd definitely recommend this for fans of both doom and black metal. But this is for the more musically curious as well!