As reviewed in The Quietus, Manuel Gagneux’s singular marrying of American spirituals, gospel, and devotional music with back metal announced itself with one of the most strikingly original debut's in experimental metal with 2016's "Devil is Fine". In the ensuing years since, his Zeal & Ardor project has grown into a fully-fledged touring band, and with it, new directions for the sound of the project. The initial releases boundary-pushing fusion of disparately unrelated genres has given way to a blues rock occasionally spiritual music inflection, with their black metal origins drifting further away. Yet Gagneux’s vision, a hybridization of strands of American black music and black metal, seems to posit the question; what if rather than Christian devotionals, the American south was the birthplace of devotionals for Lucifer Morningstar. In the process, it is inevitable that this music investigation would unsettle and inspire outrage, as much as it would gain followers. Speaking with The Quietus in their, "Be Your Own God: An Interview with Zeal & Ardor", Gagneux addresses the often polar reactions in the metal community, which have either dismissed Zeal & Ardor as a gimmick of dilution of the genre, or have leveled accusations of cultural appropriation, skeptical of just how genuine a regard Gagneux offers the source material from the American south.
In conversation with The Guardian, "Zeal & Ardor: Meet the Black Metal Bluesman", he explores the components of their "Greif", comprised of blastbeats, squalling guitars and Gagneux’s self-penned spirituals, modelled after the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s field recordings, through forceful assertion of a bluesy approach to his songs of praise. Now on tour of North America alongside Portugal's Gaerea with a date at The Showbox Seattle, "Avant-garde Metallers Zeal & Ardor Unleash their Adventurous Side on the Excellent 'Greif'". Few artists have taken the edict of experimental black metal's voracious absorption of genres into its corpus further than Gagneux and his band. Yet Zeal & Ardor are just one of the numerous outfits which have broken free from the constraints in traditional sounds that have been regarded as metal. Many of these bands have now come to encompass melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration and electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The voluminous body of which is detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World", with complimentary curation from this sphere found in the excellent selections of The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus. These articles sound the deep expanse of these movements, which are sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Century Media, Relapse, and The Flenser.
