How the internet brought Zeal & Ardor’s unorthodox style to life
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13.02.2019

How the internet brought Zeal & Ardor’s unorthodox style to life

Words by Meg Crawford

It sounds like an uncomfortable pairing, but Swiss/New York band Zeal & Ardor merge black metal with gospel, soul, blues and slave songs, and damn if it doesn’t work.

From Montreal Jazz Festival through to Germany’s Wacken Open Air, festivals from all over the world across all genres are chasing their services.

The curious meld started out kind of as a joke. Frontman Swiss-American Manuel Gagneux took the dubious step of hitting up 4chan for suggestions about two disparate genres to mashup as a way of sparking creativity, the premise being that he’d use whatever was thrown up to write a song within the hour.

The response was characteristically 4chan – offensive and expletives aside, Gagneux emerged with a fusion of black metal and gospel. Uploading the result of the experiment onto Bandcamp, the tune garnered more attention than Gagneux ever anticipated.

Then he was being asked to play festivals, which necessitated asking some pals to join him, and what started out as bookings for about seven gigs turned into a run of around 200 shows. “Bizarre,” Gagneux laughs.

Although prior to the inception of Zeal & Ardor, Gagneux was working on a chamber-pop project, he was already familiar with black metal. “Friends introduced me to it as a teen,” he explains. “It was pretty unspectacular, but aggressive, fast music has an unbelievable draw for teens, I think. At least it did to me.” In contrast, the blues/soul/spiritual aspect of the band required a deep research dive, starting with ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s recordings.

Likewise, Gagneux has been careful about the representations of paganism and Satanism in the band’s canon. “I’m into chaos magick, but refrain from sharing too much about my personal beliefs,” Gagneux explains. “The stuff in the music is well researched and has had a lot of thought put into it, but if you don’t care for or about it, it’s often subtle enough to be ignored.”

While the band are in their prime and have solidified a loyal fanbase, Gagneux has expressed hesitation about the project’s longevity. “I think it’s important to be realistic about these things,” Gagneux observes. “Sure we could milk it and keep doing exactly what we do, but we’d lose our fascination with it. What I meant was the longevity of our own interest in it too. If we refrain from the idea that we can improve ourselves and the project, I think we’d end up disappointing people.”

Similarly, Gagneux has some qualms about the miasma from which the band was born. For a start, he finds some of the rhetoric in the black-metal scene bothersome, to say the least. “It’s mostly the nationalistic views of certain bands,” he says, of what specifically bugs him. “It’s lamentable, in my opinion. Also, I’m not a huge fan of murder.” Plus, Satanism’s no-mercy-for-the-weak shtick strikes him as a “bit silly.”

Of course, he still regards 4chan with some healthy skepticism too.

“I think it’s an interesting place, because there is an unfiltered avalanche of opinions, piss-takes and shit-posts that stem from the fact that no one is held accountable. With almost every other corner of the web heavily attached to or relying on one’s identity, there’s something to be said about an anonymous forum.

“Of course there is an immeasurable amount of trash, but every now and again something interesting shows up. It’s the things you feel are too weird to talk about with your friends. It’s sometimes enlightening, rarely touching and mostly vile.”

Zeal & Ardor come to Brunswick’s Stay Gold (sold out) on Saturday February 23. They’ll also play headline shows in Brisbane and Sydney with which tickets are available via Carbon Sunset.