In the space of ten years or so, Zeal & Ardor has emerged, surprised and quickly won over a vast audience. Begun as a curious experiment by Manuel Gagneux, almost like a recreation, the project very quickly became much more serious. There was no real question of surprise on the previous eponymous album, a sort of synthesis and apotheosis of a genre that mixes extreme metal and gospel, among other things. So where should the beast go from here, without repeating itself or becoming blunt?
The griffin on the cover of GREIF says it all. This hybrid creature is a reflection of what Zeal & Ardor has become, a patchwork of different parts, a musical Frankenstein's creature... The proof: for the first time, Manuel Gagneux did not record alone and invited his band to join him in the studio. More than ever, his baby is a sum of heterogeneous parts, a notion that is also reflected in the album's promotion as each single was accompanied by a cryptic video, a sequence shot in which nothing happened but all showed the same thing from a different angle. Here again, experimentation and assembly are at the heart of the approach.
Zeal & Ardor have not mellowed with age. Yet GREIF is by far the band's least heavy album, its least violent. The more aggressive outbursts of the past have all but disappeared, relegated to certain tracks (the poignant Are You the Only One Now? and its mix of bittersweet pop melancholy and black metal, perhaps the emotional high point of the album, the disturbing Clawing Out, whose noisy bites shows that Zeal & Ardor aren't missing much if they're going to successfully switch to heavyweight industrial, Sugarcoat combines wicked riffs, growl, menacing whispers and ironically intoned ‘lalalalala’ and Hide in Shade, at the end of the record, returns to ‘classic’ Zeal & Ardor, devastating and irresistible).
On the contrary: Zeal & Ardor may roar less loudly, but they've never tried so hard and varied their pleasure. Stoner, blues rock, heavy rock, pop, electro, ambient: it's all there. This band of mad scientists try, tinker, tweak, shake and lose us, without forgetting to remind us of the band's DNA here and there with a few choirs (Go Home my Friend) although the gimmicks of the past are less omnipresent, Gagneux having developed his project beyond its initial narrative (black slaves who rebel and turn to the Devil rather than the god of their masters). The Bird, The Lion, And The Wildkin, with its rise in intensity and martial drumming, the prog tension of Kilonova, the declamations of Disease (which remind us monomaniacs of Trent Reznor's ghost from the Year Zero era) and the unstoppable groove of the rousing Thrill, all take us by surprise. Zeal & Ardor is sunny and sinister at the same time, fun and dangerous, like the griffin on the artwork that serves as the symbol of a popular festival in Basel, the band's home town, but with sharp claws.
GREIF is a multiple, wild, polycephalous monster. It is not easily tamed. Its succession of short tracks interspersed with the usual transitions, which have always punctuated Zeal & Ardor albums with their strangeness, can be disconcerting. But this is the very essence of Zeal & Ardor: a playful drive to create, hybridise and decompartmentalise that serves as a platform for the expression of darker things. Disjointed, scattered? Perhaps GREIF is, and we need to give its visible seams time to heal before the creature appears in all its glory, more than ever the ideal emblem of what the project is, its soul in all its vivacity, ardour and madness.
