This paper explores the notion of barulho (noise) in Mindelo, São Vicente, Cabo Verde, as a contested sonic category shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary spatial politics. While scholarship von Cabo Verdean music has predominantly centered genres framed as “tradition”—such as morna, coladeira, batuku, and funaná—this paper turns to two practices that are frequently relegated to the domain of barulho: Kolá San Jon and Heavy Metal in Mindelo. In local discourse, barulho often contrasts with ideas of heritage and respectability, implying that excessive loudness, distortion, and percussive intensity fall outside the bounds of legitimate tradition. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine how Kolá San Jon’s processional drumming and Heavy Metal’s amplified rehearsals and concerts are regulated, spatially contained, and at times morally condemned. Building on Camal’s (2019) concept of “creolized auralities,” I argue that both forms articulate alternative modes of sonic belonging that unsettle inherited hierarchies of civility and musical value rooted in colonial governance. Historically, African-derived expressive forms were disciplined through spatial restriction and discourses of disorder; contemporary debates over volume, amplification, and public festivity echo these earlier regimes. Finally, this paper conceptualizes barulho as a relational category through which race, class, and postcolonial modernity are negotiated. By juxtaposing these two genres, I demonstrate how creolized aural practices challenge dominant auditory regimes and reconfigure urban space through sound. In doing so, the paper contributes to ethnomusicological discussions on sound, power, and the afterlives of colonialism in the Atlantic.