On the north bank of the wide, fast-flowing stretch of the River Rhine that cleaves Basel in two, a man with a hipster moustache is giving the finger to a building on the other side. This is Tiziano Volante, guitarist with Zeal & Ardor, and he grew up in this well-heeled Swiss city.
“What are you doing?” says Manuel Gagneux, Zeal & Ardor’s eloquent singer, guitarist and chief architect, equally amused and baffled by his bandmate and fellow Basel native’s dramatically performative ire. “These guys aren’t going to know what that is.”
Manuel patiently explains to the visiting Brits in their midst – i.e. Metal Hammer – that the sprawling building his bandmate is gesticulating at is a multi-million-dollar house that belongs to one of the richest families in Europe, the kind who made their fortunes centuries ago and haven’t let it slip from their grasp since.
“I’m just trying to show them what that represents,” says Tiziano, whose English is as good as Manuel’s, which is to say way better than Metal Hammer’s French, German, Italian or Romansh (Google it). “There are two faces to this city.”
This is true. One of those faces is embodied by the mansion across the water, the kind of residence that marks out Switzerland as one of the richest countries in the world. The other face is the Basel that produced Zeal & Ardor. This isn’t so much a place as a community, one centred around a potent, life-shaping squat culture. Manuel, Tiziano and at least some of their four other bandmates were shaped by the city’s squat scene long before the singer willed Z&A into existence a decade ago as an unlikely response to an internet dare.
But we’ll get to all that in a moment. Right now, it’s cold and raining, and no one wants to hang out here much longer. “Summer in Basel,” says Manuel. “Let’s go to a bar.”
Hirscheneck is a counter-cultural institution in Basel. This scuffed but vibey corner bar was once a squat venue that was central to the city’s underground punk scene. In fact, Hirscheneck was so underground and punk that the guy who used to book shows refused to put Nirvana on.
“They wanted to play here, but he was like, ‘No, they can’t,’” says Manuel. “They weren’t punk enough. It was like his badge of honour.” He nods at a grey-haired older guy sitting a couple of tables away. “That’s him.”
The grey-haired guy waves back like the local celebrity he is. It’s 4pm. We’ve got a couple of hours before we meet the rest of the band – co-vocalists Marc Obrist and Denis Wagner, drummer Marco von Allmen and bassist Lukas Kurmann – and hit the banks of the Rhine for Hammer’s photo shoot. A vague plan for Manuel to give us tour of the places that shaped him, and hence Zeal & Ardor, has been kiboshed by the fact that it’s absolutely pissing with rain. Which is why the singer, Tiziano and Hammer are huddled at a table under a large umbrella outside Hirscheneck, mainlining coffee and attempting to keep dry.
In the past Manuel would have done this kind of thing alone, but Zeal & Ardor’s new album, Greif, marks a step change in how the band operate. As with its three predecessors (2016’s Devil Is Fine, 2018’s Stranger Fruit and 2022’s Zeal & Ardor), it was written by Manuel. Unlike those records, it was recorded by the whole band. “For me, we are at our best when we play live,” says Manuel. “That’s the experience I wanted to convey here. It made perfect sense to have them on the record.”
Zeal & Ardor’s first two albums operated within very clear parameters – an unlikely fusion of black metal and the kind of (anti) spirituals that might have been sung by enslaved Africans in the Southern states of the US. The eponymous third album pushed those boundaries back while simultaneously managing to be the most ‘metal’ thing Z&A had released. Greif takes a left turn, drawing as much on alt rock as it does metal. This is partly because of the way it was recorded, but partly because Manuel wanted to shake things up.
“I had been writing music for a fictional black metal band in a movie, about toxic masculinity and fascism,” he says, adding that he can’t reveal the movie’s title yet. “I didn’t notice at the time, but I think I was all metalled out when I started writing this album. It kind of drove me to write more eclectic and interesting songs.”
One notable thing about Zeal & Ardor is just how frictionless their rise has been - aside from a few black metal gatekeepers, the three albums and one EP they’ve released so far have been rapturously received. Cynic that he is, Manuel says he’s waiting for the backlash. “It’s like the Sword Of Damocles,” he says. “When’s it gonna drop?”
But that’s the thing. It hasn’t, has it? Manuel: “That’s why we’re so cautious. It’s like, ‘When is the crisis coming?’ You always read about these short-lived bands who get all the hype and then just vanish.”
“No one believes the hype less than us,” says Tiziano.
Hirscheneck is a fitting place to talk. Both Manuel and Tiziano have been coming here for years, long before the former recruited the latter to help turn Zeal & Ardor from a oneman project into a full band after the release of Devil Is Fine. The pair were active on the Basel squat scene, both as onlookers and musicians.
“It was very much a ‘We’re going to do it ourselves and eat terrible tabbouleh’-type thing,’” Manuel says. “Idealistic punk people having weekly discussions about politics. I’d partake, but it was quite tedious: Swiss people talking about how Yemen should be ruled.”
“It was really vibrant, but there was this weird dichotomy of people being too well off to actually be living like this,” says Tiziano.
Manuel continues: “You can’t fault them for their lifestyle, but when they’d go dumpster-diving and serve you weeks-old pre-cooked pasta, it gets to the point where you think, ‘You could have just asked your parents.’”
Tiziano never squatted, but Manuel did. He’d spent a fruitless year in his early 20s living with a family friend in New York. “I tried to make it as a musician, but the world was not waiting for me,” he says drily.
When that didn’t work out, he moved back to Basel, where he ended up living in a squat-cum-bar not too far away from where we are now. “It was unhealthy but fun,” he says. “Since I was the bartender, I had ample opportunity to drink free beer. It wasn’t like we were making money. It was something we did for our friends. And the free beer was an enticing aspect.”
He wrote Devil Is Fine, with its provocative mix of black metal, made-up ‘slave chants’ and occult themes, in that squat. He would hunch over his laptop, creating beats and playing his guitar. “I would go into the basement and scream into the void,” he says.
The very first Zeal & Ardor show took place in a squat, although ‘show’ is stretching it. It was Manuel performing the songs from Devil Is Fine solo at 2am. “I had to press play on my laptop and play my guitar and go ‘AAAARRGGGGHHHH!’”he says. “It was just a shitty mess. That’s why I was eager to recruit The Avengers.”
The superhero team he’s referring to are the rest of Zeal & Ardor. Manuel and Tiziano knew each other from their pre-Z&A bands. The former asked the latter if he wanted to join as a drummer. “I went, ‘No, the blastbeat part of it is too difficult. But I know a guy. And you need a guitar player…’” says Tiziano.
Their first public gig as a group was at the Roadburn festival in April 2017. During their first rehearsals, they enlisted a bunch of people to watch and give feedback: friends, musicians they knew, someone from a local theatre – focus-grouping the band, basically.
Manuel: “Oh yeah. It’s wholly unromantic, but I was really insecure about how it was gonna be perceived. Especially doing black metal - there were some very critical eyes. I wanted to reduce the targets on our back.”
Did any of them tell you they thought you were shit? “The theatre guy did,” says Tiziano. “He said, ‘It was stale and too perfect.’ Which it was.”
They fine-tuned it for Roadburn and things snowballed very quickly. Three months later, they were opening for Prophets Of Rage, the supergroup featuring Public Enemy’s Chuck D, B-Real of Cypress Hill and the members of Rage Against The Machine who weren’t Zack de la Rocha. “That was supernatural to us,” says Manuel. “It was just bizarre. Bizarre but amazing.”
They also got to spend time with Tom Morello, which was pretty cool for two people who listened to Rage Against The Machine growing up. At one point, they ended up doing shots with the American guitarist in some Berlin dive.
“After the gig, he’s like, ‘I know this indie underground punk squat bar,’” says Manuel. “He could’ve just said, ‘I know this bar.’ It was almost like this attempt to validate himself as this political figure, which he already is. ‘Tom, there’s no need to convince us…’ So we go there and he presents us with a tray of tequila…’”
“…All the while being surveilled by his bodyguard,” interjects Tiziano. “Who was armed with a gun.”
Nice. More importantly, did you get high with B-Real? “Not as much as I wanted to,” says Tiziano, sadly.
“I can’t smoke weed,” reveals Manuel. “It makes me paranoid. But I got high on mushrooms with Brent Hinds from Mastodon.”
“Willie Nelson was there,” adds Tiziano. Pardon? “As a wooden cut-out,” he clarifies.
“We did a video shoot,” continues Manuel. “Brent had this brilliant idea for a sketch, but it ended up as him just rambling. I don’t think it has ever been released.”
That’s probably for the best for everyone involved. Especially Willie Nelson.
Zeal & Ardor’s new album is connected to Basel, too. The ‘greif’ of the title translates as ‘griffin’, the mythological beast with the head, torso and talons of an eagle on the body of a lion, with bits of a snake stuck on for good measure. The title and imagery is a reference to Vogel Gryff, an annual parade that takes place on the north side of the Rhine every January in which a Greif – well, a person in a Greif costume – flashes its arse at the traditionally wealthier south side.
“It’s a whole ‘us against the rich’ thing,” says Manuel. “A fuck-the-bourgeoisie vibe. Which could become a glass house for us someday if we ever get rich from this.”
The occult has been present in Zeal & Ardor’s music since the start - Devil Is Fine hinged on the vivid idea of enslaved Africans in the Southern states of the US embracing Satan instead of God. There’s still plenty of that on Greif. The propulsive Kilonova has what Manuel calls “summoning instructions” buried almost subliminally in it, while another song, Clawing Out, features “magical squares of words that you shift around like syllables… it’s basically an early version of chaos magic.”
But sitting outside Hirscheneck, it’s clear that there’s a political edge to Zeal & Ardor too, a product of their time in squats. This was most evident on 2020’s seething, powerful Wake Of A Nation EP, written in the wake of the death of George Floyd, the Black American man murdered by white police officer Derek Chauvin. There’s nothing quite so explicit on Greif, yet it’s there under the surface of songs such as Kilonova.
But then this shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, given that Manuel was part of an anarcho-syndicalist group earlier in his life. Did it involve marches and throwing petrol bombs?
“Those aren’t things I’m willing to share right now,” he says, grinning. “No, it wasn’t that extreme. We were active, and we did a lot of things. If they were helpful, I don’t know. If they made sense, I don’t know. They made sense to us.”
Did you break the law? [Slight pause] “Yes.”
How did you break the law? “Oh, come on…” he says, like he’s ever going to tell a journalist. Then Tiziano comes to his rescue.
“That brings us to the Greif theme –it’s mostly about finding creative and non-harmful ways of rebelling. In the tradition of the parade, the Greif shows its backside to the bourgeois part of Basel. It’s a fun way of sticking it to the man.”
There’s an argument that the idea of anybody from Switzerland sticking it to anybody in authority is ridiculous. In many ways, Switzerland is the man – it’s a lovely country, for sure, but one that has spent centuries hoarding other people’s wealth and getting rich off it, all the while remaining conveniently neutral when it comes to international conflicts.
“We like everyone’s money,” quips Tiziano.
“You’re saying, ‘What do we have to rebel about?’” says Manuel, after a moment’s thought. “Is it fair for someone who is not in a situation of suffering to rebel against things that they’re not directly affected by? And is suffering the only ticket to activism? I think it isn’t.”
He’s right, of course. And Switzerland has plenty of its own problems too, not least the growing presence of the far right, a rise that seems to mirror so many other western countries right now. But that’s a whole other conversation. The rain is finally easing up. There are photos to be taken and expensive houses for us to give the finger to.
It’s 10pm and the photo shoot is long finished. Manuel, who has the yacht-rock side-project Soft Captain, spent much of it whistling the hook from Hall & Oates’ 1982 hit Maneater, earworming everyone within a 30-metre radius. “It’s a brilliant song,” he says (spoiler: it isn’t).
Right now, we’re sitting outside a different drinking hole, the Irrsinn Bar, with all of Zeal & Ardor plus a couple of friends. This is Basel’s local rock hangout, and Manuel is greeted like a regular when he arrives by the guy who runs it. Like the gentlemen he is, the singer gets in the first round, as well as all the others that follow. We can even forgive him Maneater. It’s interesting seeing Zeal & Ardor like this: as a band, rather than the Manuel Gagneux show they’re sometimes perceived as. The man himself certainly seems to like the idea.
“We’re co-dependent in a lot of ways,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here without them and they wouldn’t be here without me. So we need each other, for better or worse. So if we embrace that concept, there’s cool shit that could happen.”
It’s getting late. Manuel’s going to head back to his apartment to play videogames, though the rest of the band plan on sticking around. Glasses are clinked, hands shaken, farewells made. The backlash will have to wait a while longer.
Greif is out now via Redacted. Zeal & Ardor play Shepherd's Bush Empire on September 22.
