Zeal & Ardor Zeal & Ardor

Anger fizzes and seeps from every pore of the 14-track opus, yet it's not an unrelenting musical smash. The album is as artistically unexpected and surprising as one might expect from such an uncompromising musician. But this time the madness comes with a condensed focus. Fontman Manuel Gagneux explains, "With the self-titled album, we've arrived at where I imagined this project should sound like. It's the longest we've worked on a single album, and I think it shows. The most important thing for an album of ours is that you can immediately get into our mood, into our world. Even though it might not be what you'd expect from us, this album meets those expectations exactly. We've had time to figure out what makes us interesting and what sounds we want to explore, and that's how we found our home."

Zeal & Ardor's music is characterized by the interplay of gospel and black metal. With their studio albums "Devil Is Fine" and "Stranger Fruit" they have grown to become one of the most innovative metal bands, enjoying great respect for their artistic fearlessness and outlandish creativity even outside the metal scene. This is reflected in the diversity of their performances, which range from the Montreux Jazz Festival to Download, Lowlands, Wacken, Reading & Leeds, The Great Escape, Primavera Sound and Hellfest. Zeal & Ardor embody resistance to the boring, the monotonous, the ordinary. That's what makes their third album so exciting.