Zeal & Ardor

This self-titled record is the third album by the Swiss band Zeal & Ardor, released on 11 February 2022 by MVKA. Manuel Gagneux started the band in 2013 to lay black metal over the sound of African-American spirituals. He was born in Basel in 1989 to an African American mother and a Swiss father, both musicians, and learned piano early; as a teenager he played in a crossover band called Hellalujah, and after moving to New York in 2012 he began a chamber pop project called Birdmask. He has described how the band came about: he posted Birdmask music to 4chan for blunt feedback and would ask users for two genres to combine into a song in half an hour. One of them suggested black metal and another a racial slur, and his answer to that pairing became Zeal & Ardor, out of the question of what might have happened if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus. What began as one man's project gained a line-up after MVKA signed it in 2016: Gagneux on vocals and guitar, Denis Wagner and Marc Obrist on backing vocals, Tiziano Volante on guitar, Mia Rafaela Dieu on bass -- later replaced by Lukas Kurmann -- and Marco Von Allmen on drums. This follows Devil Is Fine of 2016 and Stranger Fruit of 2018, with Greif coming in 2024. The order here is the fourteen tracks of the American digipak CD, MVLP1049.