Zeal & Ardor may be a young band in the grander scheme of black metal, but mastermind Manuel Gagneux has already led a story-filled life growing up in the colourful city of Basel, Switzerland.
Before debut album Devil Is Fine stunned with its fusion of heavy music and slave spirituals, he was jamming in disused bunkers, garrisoned with dumbasses in the Swiss Army and watching bands stab themselves with tattoo needles. Here’s some of his hard-earned wisdom.
PARENTS AREN’T PERFECT
“My mum told me this story where she and my dad were in New York. They walked by a restaurant and my dad would just grab food off other people’s plates as they went by. I guess it was a weird move to impress my mum.”
STAY IN SCHOOL
“The education system was a big argument [for us living in Switzerland]. My parents didn’t want me and my brother to go to American schools, I guess because the quality of the curriculum here was more compelling. So, we went to Swiss schools – which I didn’t stay in.”
RACISM BAFFLED ME
“My earliest memory of racism is when me and my mum went to the supermarket. I must’ve been seven. This woman started yelling at us, ‘Get out of here! Get out of this country! I can’t believe they let you into this store!’ I wasn’t scared; I was confused, like, ‘How? Why?’ It didn’t occur to me that it was racism because it was so outside of normalcy for me.”
I WAS NOT A BORN SINGER
“When I was 11, I got an Offspring CD for Christmas. It had the lyrics booklet and I’d sing along, having never heard the songs before. I was winging it. My mum opened my door and went, ‘Never do that again, please.’ Ha ha!”
YOU CAN BE INSPIRED BY THE SIMPLEST THINGS
“There was a huge squatting and punk scene in Basel. I saw my friends play onstage and went, ‘Hang on. These are people I know! What the fuck are they doing here? Wait… you can just do this?! That’s amazing!’”
CHECK WHERE YOUR FOOD COMES FROM
“There was a venue in Basel called The Villa. It was a ‘spite home’, from when there was some industrial building going on and someone just didn’t want to sell that particular piece of land. It was in the middle of a chemical plant or some shit. If you played there, they’d make you food, but they scavenged it from dumpsters.”
YOU HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE
“My first black metal band was just two 16- year-olds in a bunker. Switzerland has bunkers everywhere, and these bunkers have water tanks attached to them. We found one of the water tanks empty. It was this decently sized cavity but the acoustics were horrible and the air quality was bad. We probably shouldn’t have lit as many torches in there as we did. Ha ha!”
DON’T POINT A GUN IN YOUR OWN FACE
“I joined the Swiss Army at 20. There was this one guy who was not smart. The first six weeks, you do basic training, so everyone has a gun. Before they give you a uniform, they give you a gun. It was fucking wild! The first time we get ammunition and are about to shoot shit, he looks down the barrel to see if the bullet is in it. At that point I figured, ‘This is a bad endeavour.’”
BE HUMBLE; BE ORIGINAL
“I was 22 when I went to live in New York. There was a culture shock, but in a good way; when you’re in New York and you think you’re good at something, you can be certain that there’s someone in the same city who does it much better. That forces you to be humble and then be original.”
THE FIRST ZEAL & ARDOR GIG SUCKED
“At the first Zeal & Ardor show, I was also the sound guy, because the guy who organised it couldn’t find a sound engineer. I think it was Greenleaf, a stoner rock band, playing and I was in way over my head. They had an in-ear system. They’d ask about the monitor and I’d sweat bullets and Google, ‘What is a monitor?!’ Ha ha ha! I did my set in the basement, for some reason. It was me with a laptop doing impromptu karaoke, basically.”
MY FAMILY SUPPORT ZEAL & ARDOR – BUT DON’T UNDERSTAND IT
“My mum’s moved back to the US and she comes to our shows in the New York area. She always brings my aunt, who gives me that warm, supportive ‘How nice.’ Ha ha!”
DON’T BRAND PEOPLE
“We offered to brand fans at early Zeal & Ardor shows. We built this branding iron and brought the Bunsen burner with us so we could heat it up. It was this art piece; we said, ‘If you get yourself branded, you get merch for free,’ but it was a commentary on blindly following people. If you blindly follow anything, you may as well get branded by it. That was my cool, edgy thought, but then people actually did it and I thought, ‘Oh, fuck, this is getting out of hand!’ It was set up with the idea that no one would ever do it. Eight people did.”
SATANISM WILL ALWAYS BE COOL
“You don’t get into black metal as a teenager without reading some sketchy books. It began there, I guess, and I never really quit. There’s something compelling about secret societies and Satanism has that aspect to it. That’s why people are obsessed with the Illuminati and the idea of obtaining secret knowledge – even if you got that knowledge from a book you bought, so it’s probably not that secret. Ha ha!”
BEING A BUZZ BAND IS TOO MUCH PRESSURE
“Making [Zeal & Ardor’s second album] Stranger Fruit was daunting because the sophomore album, when you have hype around you, is go time. If you fuck it up, you could be gone for good. The sword of Damocles was over my head. It was a fight to prove that this wasn’t a fluke. It was two flukes! Ha ha!”
SOME HISTORY LESSONS ARE DISTURBING
“A couple of years ago, I learnt about the Tuskegee experiments, where, in the city of Tuskegee, the Black community was given free medical treatment [from 1932-1972]. In fact, [the doctors] were just giving them syphilis to research an infected human body. It’s super-fucked.”
SONGWRITING CAN HELP YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
“Writing the Wake Of A Nation EP [featuring the song Tuskegee] was basically therapy, because it was in 2020 [after George Floyd’s murder and during the widespread Black Lives Matter protests]. I was genuinely worried about my family in the US. I couldn’t sleep. I had panic attacks. Just to get through that, I did really specific songs. In metal, you often have to feign aggression or sadness. That was not the case with Wake Of A Nation.”
BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER
“Is the US safer for Black people now than it was in 2020? Absolutely not. I think people have gained confidence that they don’t need to feign compassion anymore. You can just be honest about the fact that you don’t care for a certain group of people. There are so many white nationalist groups now. They used to hide… now you can have bumper stickers.”
ZEAL & ARDOR HAVE GROWN
“Our last record [2022’s Zeal & Ardor], isn’t ‘black metal meets slave spirituals’, but it’s still marketed as that. That’s a very specific niche of music. The playing field is so small, so there might be a finite amount of good songs you can get out of it. I don’t know one person who just listens to one sort of music, so the idea that musicians only do one specific sort of music is just… how did that happen?”
DON’T LIMIT YOURSELF TO ONE MEDIUM
“I’m currently doing music for two films. I don’t want to say too much and get in trouble, but both have an orchestral aspect to them. It’s fun that I get to conduct. They’re closely knit to the Zeal & Ardor project.”
Zeal & Ardor play Bloodstock in August.
