Although mainly known as a progressive metal and avant-garde or experimental metal band, Kekal has stylistic origins in extreme metal, particularly black metal, but even with its debut album the band demonstrated a unique style. "Beyond the Glimpse of Dreams" featured a varied sound of black and death metal and incorporated a range of vocal styles such as high pitched black metal shrieks, death growls, and female singing. On "Embrace the Dead", Kekal used a combination of black metal with death, classic, and doom metal elements and included hints of Gothic and dark wave. The third album, "The Painful Experience", saw the band fusing its black metal style with progressive metal and included elements of thrash, classic, and power metal. Mark Allan Powell described that most of the band's songs were midtempo to fast with a heavy, guitar-driven style, though the band incorporated "certain elements of variety into the sound." In a 2001 interview, Jeff expressed ambivalence to what style the band was described as, as long as it was "metal". On its fourth, highly technical album, "1000 Thoughts of Violence", the band plunged into ultra-progressive experiments, The album was noted for switching between raging intensity and more mellow passages, such as the song "Violent Society", which even included a hip-hop passage. Powermetal.de noted that the band had become more progressive and lost some of its toughness and aggression. "Psych Folk" Radio viewed the album favorably, mentioning that "1000 Thoughts of Violence" "is a possibility to invite progressive rock listeners to take the challenge to open up their perspectives." In March 2004, "Aardschok" Magazine described the band's albums as a mix of black, heavy, and progressive metal, being grounded in the extreme metal scene.