Review
Review
Zeal & Ardor at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 22/09/24
Avant-garde black metal and African spirituals collide into one of the most exciting bands in rock
“We’re a silly band from Switzerland,” says the ever-self-effacing Manuel Gagneux. The mastermind – and until recently, the sole creative engine – behind Zeal & Ardor appears rather humbled by just how much adulation their 2,000-strong contingent have for his project. Then again, ‘silly’ is a choice description for it when tonight’s setlist features songs that imagine what would have happened if slaves had turned to Satan instead of God, and a few of which were written as a response to the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
In that sense, by coalescing such disparate styles as black metal and African spirituals and by telling such stories and by reclaiming a genre home to a few too many fascists, Zeal & Ardor are doing something quite important. They, however, would never claim that. There’s no pretention to their live show and no extended speeches – the “second speech” of the night, in fact, not a speech, but a detour into “more angry music”. Instead, as a live outfit, Zeal & Ardor is a lean, sabre-toothed animal.
The first salvo of a riff in atmospheric, textured opener ‘The Bird, The Lion And The Wildkin’ booms from the stage loud enough to wake the dead, while ‘Gotterdammerung’ sends a bolt of electricity through the crowd. It doesn’t just sound stunning; it looks it too. Five of the six band members are lined up along the front of stage in black cloaks, and backlit by a dramatic light show and tendrils of smoke, they look like shadows.
Make no mistake, there’s plenty to mosh about here, especially to their more energetic self-titled album, but a Zeal & Ardor show is nonetheless a nuanced thing. Even its gentler moments hold focus, from the creeping ‘Kilonova’ to the soft textures of ‘To My Ilk’, for which the audience put their energy into clapping to every beat (surprisingly on time).
Wrapping up with a seething rendition of ‘Clawing Out’, a curious choice of closer that leaves the set on an eerie feeling of incompletion, Zeal & Ardor have distilled their entire sound into a tight hour-and-a-quarter set that leaves them with nothing left to prove. Are they one of the best live acts in modern metal right now? They’re fierce contenders.
