Zeal and Ardor

Zeal & Ardor began in 2013 as a solo experiment by Manuel Gagneux, a Swiss-American musician born in Basel to an African American mother and a Swiss father, after an anonymous internet forum dared him to fuse two genres nobody had thought to combine: black metal and African-American spirituals. The pairing should not have worked, and yet Devil Is Fine, the 2016 debut it produced, landed Gagneux a deal with MVKA and a spot on Rolling Stone's list of the year's best metal records. He built the project into a full band soon after, adding backing vocalists to carry call-and-response gospel lines against blast beats and tremolo guitar. Stranger Fruit followed in 2018, then a self-titled album in 2022 and Greif in 2024, each one pushing the hybrid further into blues, industrial noise and choral arrangement without losing the tension that made the first record startling. The band has since played Montreux, Roadburn and Wacken, and in 2026 marked the tenth anniversary of Devil Is Fine with an expanded reissue carrying five previously unheard tracks.