Zeal & Ardor – Stranger Fruit (2LP)

Stranger Fruit, the second album by provocative Swiss-American metallurgist Zeal & Ardor, ends with a perfect piece of black metal for 2018. Above an invocation of roaring guitars, Manuel Gagneux begins to sing, his voice bending forward with the urgency of Sam Cooke’s revolutionary soul. “Like a strange fruit out of season, you are bound to die alone,” he starts, his voice floating in and out of a woeful melisma. “You will swing free in the breeze then/You are bound to die alone.” But Gagneux doesn’t stop with a historical lynching; he briskly pulls that terrible past into the worrisome present, noting the senses of isolation, exploitation, and existential anxiety that come with being black (or any sort of outsider, really) in modern America. “They’re coming closer just to kill us,” he laments as a blast beat collapses into a series of doleful handclaps and foot stomps. A mix of au courant “atmospheric black metal” and gripping Southern soul, the music is itself a time machine. A plea for defiance and another piece of proof that black metal’s evolution remains unfinished, “Built on Ashes” is one of the year’s most powerful songs, a real anthem for our era.
Stranger Fruit is an uneven record. But by mixing genres and squaring them against ancient issues that remain tragically current, these songs grapple with past, present, and the possibility of the future by asking two necessary questions: How can art let us understand the problems we’ve overlooked or misunderstood? And how can we begin to fix them?