Avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor returns to Berkeley
Black metal meets gospel band Zeal & Ardor returns to Berkeley to headline the UC Theatre Friday, joined by fellow boundary-pushing act Gaerea and industrial-synth duo Zetra.
Led by Swiss-American guitarist/singer Manuel Gagneux, the experimental group builds its unusual sound on the collision of black metal with traditional gospel and blues. Raised by an African-American mother and a Swiss father who were both musicians, Gagneux initially listened to more extreme sounds including grindcore, techincal and death metal as a youth, but got his start making indie pop in the band Hellelujah before moving to New York City and founding the chamber pop project Birdmask.
He would start Zeal and Ardor as a musical exercise after suggestions on a 4chan discussion board led him to try and combine black metal with early blues and spirituals. Gagneux would later say the resulting sounds were intended to answer the question, "What if Black American slaves embraced Satan instead of Jesus?" After releasing a number of one-man recordings online, the musician recorded the group's acclaimed eponymous 2016 debut.
The success of that album led him to recruit a full band including multiple back-up singers to replicate the group's gospel-choir sound when recording the follow-up effort, Stranger Fruit. That album earned another round of high praise two years later as Gagneux and company became a popular live attraction with prominent appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands and Psycho Las Vegas in the U.S. The band also released an in-concert document in 2019, Live in London, which perfectly captured their intense stage show.
While the pandemic would keep the group off the road, in 2020 Gagneux released some of his most political songs yet with the Wake the Nation EP, a recording that was in direct response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the unrest that erupted across the country in response.
The band's self-titled third album came out earlier in 2022 year and continued to expand Zeal & Ardor's musical palette with elements of hip hop and electronica, shoegaze and industrial added to Gagneux's black-metal gospel template. The band was last in the Bay Area when it headlined Berkeley's Cornerstone with equally experimental metal acts Sylvaine and Imperial Triumphant before all three performed at Aftershock 2022 in Sacramento.
Earlier this year, Zeal & Ardor released its latest effort entitled Greif, the band's first where Gagneux utilized his full live band in the studio. The new recording continues to encompass a wide range of influences and styles while moving away from the aggression of the bandleader's earlier work. For the current tour that stops at the UC Theatre Friday night, Gagneux and company are joined by another black metal outfit pushing the envelope and shredding genre expectations, Portugal's Gaerea. Formed in the coastal city of Porto nearly a decade ago, the masked quintet mixes black-metal brutality with haunting atmospheres, soaring melodies and existential dread on its fourth album Coma that was released in October. British industrial-synth duo Zetra opens the show.
Zeal & Ardor with Gaerea and
Friday, Dec. 13, 7 p.m. $30
UC Theatre
