Band:	Zeal & Ardor
Album:	Stranger Fruit
Style:	Avantgarde black metal
Release date:	June 2018

01. Intro
02. Gravedigger's Chant
03. Servants
04. Don't You Dare
05. Fire Of Motion
06. The Hermit
07. Row Row
08. Ship On Fire
09. Waste
10. You Ain't Coming Back
11. The Fool
12. We Can't Be Found
13. Stranger Fruit
14. Solve
15. Coagula
16. Built On Ashes

Devil Is Fine made some gargantuan waves two years ago with its surprising blend of African American spirituals, black metal, and some electronica for good measure. But the gimmicky nature of the sound meant that pressure on the follow-up would be great to maintain interest. So here we are; Stranger Fruit is finally Zeal & Ardor in full form.

By now I suppose you are more or less familiar with the origin story of Zeal & Ardor, but I'll dive a bit into it regardless. Manuel Gagneux, who already had his metal-free Birdmask project, posted a thread on the /mu/ board of 4chan and, under certain rules, posters would get to choose two genres that he would blend into a song. One of those combinations happened to be black metal and a certain not-so-nice derogatory term (it's 4chan after all) for black music. The idea did stick with Gagneux, and after a less coherent but still interesting self-titled debut came Devil Is Fine, which put Zeal & Ardor in the spotlight, and the rest is history. One thing that both of the first two releases have in common is the disjointed feel that such a short album with so many diverse short songs has. Now comes Stranger Fruit.

Zeal & Ardor is no longer just a bedroom project of Gagneux, introducing an ensemble of five more musicians first as a live band and now some also in the studio. This, coupled with the fact that this is the first non-independent release of the band, does give Stranger Fruit a more cohesive and complete feeling. The production still sounds raw, but a more polished type of raw, one that only supplements the vibe of the music without taking anything away. While there is less of an emphasis on electronic elements, this puts more emphasis on it sounding like a band. The electronic elements instead work to give certain tracks a gargantuan and cinematic feel. Not only that, but the album's run time has almost doubled, so Stranger Fruit is miles ahead of Devil Is Fine as far as sounding like an album is concerned.

The songs themselves, while also not being much longer than ones on the previous two, feel more like cohesive songs instead of just skeletal ideas. With much of the appeal of tracks like "Come On Down" and "In Ashes" being how much of an impact this blend would make upon virgin ears, the ones here make less of an impact from this point of view, since the spell is already broken and this is no longer something unheard of. But that doesn't make the songs here any less impactful, much of the impact being the increased mastery in blending the sounds together without it sounding unnatural. Thus with Stranger Fruit building upon its predecessors in a more natural way, it feels so familiar and so alien at the same time.

Tracks like the "Sacrilegium" ones are still present ("The Hermit", "The Fool", "Solve"), but have less of a weight in the final product than they did before, though they do act in a way as intermezzos to separate acts. Because Stranger Fruit does the blend so well, it feels like both sides of the blend have a larger and more refined presence. While not all songs have a clear black metal sound, it is still present throughout, thus making Stranger Fruit feel like a metal album instead of an album that happens to have some metal. The soul is also much more apparent with Gagneux's singing voice in songs like "You Ain't Coming Back" and "Built On Ashes," supplementing the shouted vocals in the other tracks.

With improvements of this calibre, Zeal & Ardor proves that there is plenty of vitality in this sound and it will not die as just a gimmick. But will they be able to maintain it for the next couple of releases without adding some new elements? We'll likely see in two more years.