Zeal & Ardor: “We’re more diverse than just ‘angry’ music”

ZEAL & ARDOR never fail to pull from interesting and unusual sources, and ‘greif’ is no different.

Words: Linsey Teggert.

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As a child, Manuel Gagneux would gather with the other inhabitants of his hometown of Basel, Switzerland, to marvel at The Vogel Gryff parade. This annual folk tradition has its origins in the Middle Ages and features the main characters of the Vogel Gryff (griffin), Wild Maa (the Green Man or Wild Man) and Leu (Lion) dancing, floating down the Rhine, and partaking in cheeky antics that are meant to represent ‘sticking it to the man’.

“It’s this hundreds of years old tradition representing when workers’ unions united their weapon inspection day, and that weapon inspection day is essentially what’s happening,” explains Manuel. “You have this costumed person on a raft on the river while canons are fired, and he joins the griffin (the greif) in the ‘poor’ part of the city, where they proceed to show their backsides to the ‘rich’ part of the city and do silly dances. It’s basically class warfare when you think about it, just presented in a charming way.”

It’s a wonderfully weird tradition that is unique to the Zeal & Ardor frontman’s birthplace, and it represents the band’s fourth full-length ‘GREIF’ on many levels, largely signifying a step towards the personal for a band that has tended to lean into a sense of dark mystique, with Manuel solely steering the project he founded. ‘GREIF’ marks a new chapter in Zeal & Ardor’s constantly evolving journey, with Manuel inviting his touring bandmates into the fold, welcoming them into the studio and making them fully-fledged members of Zeal & Ardor, essentially democratising the band.

“We all saw The Vogel Gryff as kids, so this is something that ties us all together from our childhood, a small common denominator of us all. The griffin is a hybrid creature, part lion, part snake, and part bird. It’s an amalgam of more than one animal, and seeing how we all played on this record, it’s kind of like us being an amalgam and a griffin of sorts.”

“There’s nothing more personal than something you’ve experienced in your childhood”

Manuel lights up when talking about his band mates like an excited child, describing Tiziano Volante (guitar), Marc Obrist (vocals), Denis Wagner (vocals), Lukas Kurmann (bass), and Marco Von Allmen (drums) as “excellent people” who he gets “giddy” about going on tour with.

“To me, Zeal & Ardor is at its best when we play live, and that is due to those guys playing their instruments and giving their energy to it, so I figured it was a no-brainer to have them on the record. They’re in on the bigger decisions, and everyone knows what’s going to happen a little more in advance. These people have given eight years of their lives to my silly idea, and I think that merits some valuation and appreciation.”

Much like the characters of The Vogel Gryff parade, Manuel’s decision to solidify the band into a fully fleshed-out beast is his way of ‘sticking it to the man.’ “The others still have day jobs because as ‘the writer’, I get all the royalties,” Manuel admits. “That’s about to change with this record. I’d like us all to be able to do this silly screamy thing professionally.

“This is a very luck-based and popularity-based economy: the more popular you are, the more you earn. That is not something you can calculate or plan for, and while we have this finite amount of popularity, I want to make the best of it. For the duration of the time we have it, I’d like to make it as fair for everyone involved as possible. I could be very parasitical and say, ‘Yeah, you’re just here for playing live, and everything else is just ME’, but that’s not how friends would do. I couldn’t stomach being around these people while ripping them off.”

It’s no coincidence that ‘GREIF’, the Germanic for ‘griffin’ can be misinterpreted as ‘grief.’ The record marks a new turn towards the introspective for the band, something that is immediately obvious when considering the Swiss location of the theme that oversees the record, whereas Zeal & Ardor’s first two records, 2017’s ‘Devil Is Fine’ and 2018’s ‘Stranger Fruit’ were deeply rooted in Deep South America. Manuel himself describes ‘GREIF’ as a “local and smaller scale album.”

“Whereas with previous albums, I would make a conscious effort to not use ‘me’ and ‘you’ but more ‘us’ and ‘them’, this is more smaller scale, more personal. There’s nothing more personal than something you’ve experienced in your childhood, and that’s why I leaned towards this.

“In many ways, I think this is our heaviest album, but not in terms of ‘this riff is so brutal it will melt your face’, but in terms of the emotionality of it. There is a lot of grief on this record; that was a conscious thing.”

Zeal & Ardor have always been a band that can be characterised by their experimental approach to metal; the very reason they exist is down to an experiment to silence racist 4chan trolls who challenged Manuel to blend black metal with African American spirituals. Their sound has soared since then, refusing to stay tethered to one idea. 2022’s superb self-titled record saw the band continue to defy the confines of genre, creating an avant-garde patchwork of technical and black metal, chamber-pop, blues and neo-soul. ‘GREIF’, again, much like its hybrid namesake, refuses to be pigeon-holed.

“I still feel like the last record was a heavy record. I made a conscious effort not to stay in that lane but to branch out. It would be easy to fortify our position as that, but we’re more diverse than just ‘angry’ music. On one side, this is the softest record we’ve put out, but it’s also the heaviest record we’ve put out; there are so many flavours and colours on it. It’s really important for us to allow ourselves to explore, and I love that a lot.”

“In many ways, I think this is our heaviest album”

Of course, those face-melting tracks are still very much present; second single release ‘Clawing Out’ is all bludgeoning chugs and menacing whispered growl, and, of course, Manuel couldn’t resist adding in some ritualistically chanted Latin: ‘Justificatum malum factum’ which loosely translates to ‘a justifiable evil deed.’ 

‘Fend You Off’ builds in crushing intensity before exploding into a shredding riff and guttural vocals. It seems they also couldn’t resist having a dabble in those past Southern spiritual-meets-Satanic stylings of earlier records with ‘369’ which sees a repetition of the occult mantra ‘We on the left-hand path, and we ain’t never coming back’.

“It’s very much part of my life,” grins Manuel, playfully raising a small Baphomet figurine to the camera. “If I wanted to do Satanism or Occultism as a shock value thing, that’s been done before, and I think there would be more efficient ways of doing it if I was in it for clout. But the way I implement it is so obscure, it’s basically magical because people repeat the words and don’t even know what they mean.”

There are several tracks that display a side to Zeal & Ardor we’ve never been treated to before, a sexy, rock’n’roll side that’s present on the Queens of the Stone Age-esque slinky stompers ‘Disease’ and ‘Sugarcoat’.

“I just love the Queens of the Stone Age,” Manuel laughs. “I’m also very much afraid of Josh Homme hitting me; he seems like a very strong guy! We’ve never really allowed ourselves to be sensual – accusatory and angry and intense – but never sensual, and that’s a nice flavour to have! I regret nothing.”

There are also slower, plaintive moments that are demonstrative of that turn to the personal, even moments of fragility, such as ‘Solace’, the track Manuel states he’s most proud of. “That’s a very sad one. I don’t think I could play it live; I think I would start to cry; you can hear the crack in my voice. I couldn’t do those vocals better than the first time I did them in the studio – there’s an honesty to that.” 

The album concludes with the contemplative and poetic ‘To my Ilk,’ which also served as the introduction to ‘GREIF’ as the first single release and likely had some of the more extreme metalhead fans panicking.

“Every time I think I have to appease people, I tend to write my worst music,” Manuel muses. “I’m at my most creatively valuable when I just do self-serving music, as stupid as that sounds, but, in the end, that’s more honest. I can’t fake being into something that I’m not; I can be into a lot of things, but if I try to pander, it’s very obvious.”

In terms of genre exploration, Manuel is insistent that Zeal & Ardor will continue to be a hybrid creature like that mythical griffin. 

“There’s tonnes of shit I’d love to try. Of course, there’s limits; I can’t see myself saying, ‘Yeah, let’s try fucking reggae!’. We’re very much open to more influences, and the fun thing about it is me not knowing what they might be. If I knew everything I wanted to do already, that would be frustrating because it would just be an execution of things. Just to have a little mystery and have surprises in my life, that’s beautiful.” ■

Taken from the October 2024 issue of Dork.