Zeal & Ardor is a captivating project. It started as a racist prompt on a blog that Manuel Gagneux reclaimed to explore social justice and the oppressive history of racialized people at the behest of the United States of America – an unfortunately all-too-prescient message. The project’s first two records largely communicated these messages through music that combined influences from African-American spirituals, black metal, and electronic music before their self-titled record (which I had the pleasure of reviewing) significantly expanded Manuel’s sonic palette, venturing into metalcore, spaghetti Western-inspired balladry, and more. GREIF, Gagneux’s first record featuring performances from his bandmates, is both the band’s most collaborative and personal record while experimenting further with funk and alternative/classic rock influences.
With Zeal & Ardor, you can always anticipate the unexpected, and the album’s opener, “The Bird, the Lion, and the Wildkin”, is a perfect example. It combines a drum line with whistles, layers of guitars, and synth stabs before the band reprises its central motif on a glockenspiel on single “Fend You Off”. The quiet-loud dynamic and a soulful, soaring chorus from Gagneux and co-vocalists Marc Obrist and Denis Wagner conjures an almost early 2000s alt-rock vibe. The single’s outro, with blast beats, shrieks and synths, challenges anyone to label GREIF with a genre marker, adding to the album’s intrigue and further supporting justification for its title, named after a mythical creature of Swiss legend that is a snake, lion, and bird all at once.
It’s hard to refrain from making this review a track-by-track analysis, especially since there’s truly so much intriguing ground covered here. “Kilonova” is what I might imagine would happen if Opeth and Tool got together to write a funk song – the rhythms are danceable and syncopated, but the melodies and layers are distinctly haunting. Lukas Kurmann’s bass shines here. Elsewhere, “Thrill” could justify the band jumping on a tour with a myriad of desert rock band from the early oughts. However, Gagneux and Tiziano Volante’s lo-fi lead lines and upbeat, swaggering riffs, alongside hooky vocal melodies, are at odds with the devastating lines of ‘For the record I don’t feel anymore/baffled by the thrill of it all‘. Gagneux has discussed this record being an intensely personal one, and tracks like “Thrill”, the restrained balladry of “are you the only one now” and “to my ilk”, or the melancholic nostalgia of the instrumental, almost Gameboy/chiptune interlude “une ville vide”, capture an emotional undercurrent that joins the album’s 14 tracks together with an expressive, vulnerable throughline.
But of course, many found themselves drawn to Zeal & Ardor with their metallic roots, and the album has something for those fans too. “Clawing out” uses some impressive, razor-sharp rhythmic displacement from drummer Marco Von Allmen and unsettling, almost alarm-like synths to make for a heavy, groove-oriented track that would have happily sat alongside the band’s heavier 2022 self-titled record. “Hide in Shade”, GREIF‘s penultimate piece, harkens further back to the project’s debut with its call-and-response, soulful singing, piercing tremolo leads, and disparate, blackened cries.
So where does GREIF stack next to Zeal & Ardor‘s impressive and diverse previous three records? I’m not one to put things in order, but the album may be the most experimental, deftly produced, and skillfully composed release from Zeal & Ardor thus far. I’ve always felt that the project accomplishes more per song than by album, but there’s little I would trim from the record’s fourteen tracks. When I first received this record, I pressed repeat more than once upon its conclusion, and that probably tells you enough about what to do once the record drops.
