- Country: Switzerland
- Style: Avant-garde metal
- Label: Independent
- Release date: 23 August 2024
Greif is Zeal & Ardor’s fourth full-length and the first one Manuel Gagneux recorded with the whole live band in the room rather than building everything alone. You can hear it straight away. Fourteen songs in about 42 minutes, plenty of them under three minutes, and the black metal-meets-spirituals formula that made the project’s name is now just one colour among many.
There’s funk in the bass lines, a classic rock swagger to “Clawing out” and an almost Radiohead-like fragility in “Fend You Off”, which Gagneux himself called the band at its most honest. When they do go for the throat, as on “Kilonova” or the closing blast of “to my ilk”, the six-piece hits harder than the old one-man recordings ever did, and the stacked vocals from Marc Obrist and Denis Wagner fill everything out beautifully.
The flip side is that the record sometimes feels like a sketchbook. A few interludes drift past without leaving much behind. Still, as a statement of where the band is heading, it’s brave and mostly convincing.
Best tracks:
Fend You Off
Clawing out
Kilonova
Hide in Shade
to my ilk
Author’s rating: 8.1/10
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