Black Pantera made a metal album about banzo and called it Continental

The most revealing thing about Continental is that Derrick Green and Chico César share a record without it feeling like a collision. Sepultura’s vocalist has been the voice of one of metal’s most significant Brazilian acts for a generation; Chico César is among the most celebrated singer-songwriters in Brazilian popular music. Black Pantera found a way to make both presences feel necessary on the same 13 tracks.

Black Pantera (the trio of Chaene da Gama, Charles Gama, and Rodrigo Augusto) has spent years threading heavy metal through Brazil’s deeper musical history, but Continental names the project explicitly. The album argues that the country’s Afro-diasporic traditions — soul, candomblé rhythms, ancestral grief — are the foundation on which Brazilian metal stands, whether the genre acknowledges it or not.

That argument arrives most sharply on “Banzo,” the collaboration with Chico César. Banzo is the melancholy specific to Africans transported to the Americas during the slave trade: grief without a homeland to point toward. César uses the track to dismantle meritocracy arguments, turning the song into one of the most politically precise pieces Brazilian metal has produced. The album also incorporates a recorded speech by the late geographer Milton Santos, whose writing on Brazil’s position in the global order matches the band’s refusal to accept a peripheral role for the country’s music.

The remaining guests serve distinct purposes. Duquesa on “Serotonina” and Sandrá de Sá on “Quando Canto” are singers whose careers are rooted in Black Brazilian popular music. Their presence expands Continental’s sonic range without softening what the album is doing. Green’s contribution on “Obsoleto” is the most genre-bridging moment: Sepultura’s frontman arriving as a conversation between Brazilian metal’s present and one of the genre’s most recognizable international reference points.

The difficulty with an album this explicit in its politics is that its argument depends on familiarity with its context. Black Pantera’s audience remains concentrated in Brazil, and Continental’s investment in specifically local concepts — banzo, Milton Santos, the cultural geography of Afro-Brazilian heritage — sharpens its thesis while limiting how far that thesis travels. The record will reach the people who most understand it; those are not always the people who most need to hear it.

Continental contains 13 tracks and was released through Deck Music. Black Pantera has announced a Continental tour in support of the album.

The album takes its name from the whole continent. Its argument is narrower: that grief made music long before metal existed, and that Black Pantera spent their fifth album tracing that line back.

Tags: music-en1, heavy metal, metal, Black Pantera, Continental