“Contrast is more important than the tone itself. If you justhave the hardest, heaviest tone as aconstant you get numb to it”: How Zeal & Ardor are adding light and shade to black metal with plastic guitars, chunky strings and unlikely tube amps

Zeal & Ardor's Manuel Gagneux screams into the mic as Tiziano Volante lays down a riff on a stage bathed in red light.

Manuel Gagneux began writing music as Zeal & Ardor with a point to prove. A regular on 4chan forums around 2013, he was taking requests to mash genres together when one user, with a racist undercurrent, suggested he mixed black metal with Black music. Born to an African mother and Swiss father, he didn’t take the comment lightly, but stumbled upon something unique in the process.

The aggression of black metal proved a counterpoint, in equal parts tasteful and forceful, to African-American spirituals, blues, soul, trap and hip-hop. Suddenly, what started life as a retaliation, of taking pride in the diversity of sounds black musicians have forged throughout the history of recorded music, the project took on a life of its own.