Running With The The Devil

Manuel Gagneux’s Zeal & Ardor take black metal through the darkest chapters in American history and reimagine it with African-American spirituals and unholy gospel verse.

- Jonathan Horsley

Manuel Gagneux is a bonafide radical. The Swiss- American mastermind behind Zeal & Ardor has an easy bonhomie but rest assured he knows where the cultural pressure points are, and he’s not afraid to bear down upon them Ezekiel 25:17-style with great vengeance and furious anger in service of a new, dangerous sound. With Zeal & Ardor, Gagneux takes the frigid cold harshness of black metal and fuses it with African-American spirituals, hollers and gospel, constructing a counterfactual folklore that imagines a slave population eschewing Christianity and turning to the devil in search of spiritual succour. Maybe it shouldn’t work. Maybe the dissonance between the two cultures is too great: the most ideologically rigid of all heavy metal subcultures, black metal is fiercely individualistic, oft-animated by an unyielding antichristian animus; the song and verse of African-American spirituals and gospels are by their very nature communal, God-fearing, uplifting. But in Zeal & Ardor’s hypnotic and ceremonial arrangements, Gagneux embraces the duality between the two cultures, identifies where they align, and makes something cohesive.

THE DEFIANT ONE

“For me, that’s the most interesting part, because black metal on its own is very individual,” he explains. “It has this solipsistic nature, where it’s just headphone music, or whatever. You listen to it alone. But since the gospel aspects have this very inviting and enticing quality, you want to sing along. It actually invites the whole black metal element ​into this weird shared space, I guess. That’s kind of what we are chasing, and we’ll see how far we get.”