Zeal and Ardor is great music, great innovation, great art. The songs provoke through power and passion, leave you feeling unsettled, unsafe, and inspired in all of the best ways.
It’s been a privilege to watch Manuel Gagneux grow Zeal and Ardor from its groundbreaking debut through the subsequent full-length and side releases, up to 2022’s eponymous third full-length.

According to the lore, the project was begun in response to a racist message board challenge, but Gagneux didn’t just mash the styles of Death Metal and African-American slave chants. . . he instead created something with depth and darkness, something soulful and brutal, blasphemous and richly spiritual.
Although this is the third album in the legacy, it feels like a beginning. The record opens with the doom klaxon and call-response chant of the eponymous song, “Zeal and Ardor.”
The album features some of the hallmarks and tenets of the ZandA sound; it follows the previous albums’ template of pendulum swings between intensity extremes, but it’s also a step forward in songwriting and power, with newfound touches of subtlety, complexity, and presence. Manuel Gagneux is a restlessly inventive creator, and his fire burns through on this record. While this album is familiar and immediately identifiable as Zeal and Ardor, there’s absolutely no sense of carbon copying or playing it safe. Quite the opposite. . . every second of “Zeal And Ardor” is imbued with danger.
This albums is a work of genius, as were the first two. The greatest challenge is to determine which is the best of the three. As early as it is, I’m calling it early as a contender for Album of the Year 2022. “Church Burns” and “Death to the Holy” are instant classics in the ZandA pantheon. “Run” and “Feed the Machine” are also pretty great.
This project is not a fad, not a gimmick, not a passe phase; Zeal and Ardor is the real thing.