Which, with a bit of cutting to the chase, is where the new album comes in. The circumstances of its creation may be different to that of their Devil Is Fine debut, or even its follow up Stranger Fruit – Zeal & Ardor are now a known quantity, the wheels are more firmly on the road, there is now expectation rather than curiosity – but it’s also not so far from the simplicity of the beginning.
Written quickly in Manuel’s home during an intense burst of creative activity, he says that his writing process is still very much about having a spark and following it. Or, as he puts it, “Just condensing my stupid ideas.” That is: get something, try it out, if it’s got legs it stays in, get it done, then try not to pick at it too much.
“I'm not too worried about the quality of what I do,” he says. “You should hear some of the demos – they’re horrid! But creatively, I'm just fascinated by going, ‘Oh my God, what if I did this? And what if I arranged it that way?’ I'm basically like a child fascinated by a dangling key or something. There's a glee to that, definitely.
“It can [come from] anything – a vocal line, a weird sound, a guitar thing. If it entices me enough, I just kind of build around it,” he continues. “For instance, on Death To The Holy, that weird, annoying sound, it was one of the first things that came out of the album. I thought, ‘This is so annoying and so obnoxious, I kind of have to build a song around it.’ And that's how that came to be. Things start granular, and then it's just seeing what Lego parts fit to this cool new spaceship that we're trying to build. And just that the mere thought that I get to build a song around one sound, and then thousands of people have to listen to something that annoying, I can't help but laugh. And you can't help but have fun with it. If I stubbornly tried to write a song that doesn't give me that giggling sensation, nine out of 10 times it ends up sounding bad.”
Keeping all of this together are two elements crucial to Zeal & Ardor. The first is a musical tree trunk from which all of these curious branches sprawl, which Manuel notes is “imperative above everything”. Otherwise the whole thing doesn’t work.
“To me, the atmosphere is the most important thing,” he says. “As long as the atmosphere is kind of semi-constant, I can get away with even obnoxious noises and genre changes. For this record, I wrote a fuck-ton of songs that didn't make the cut or just didn't fit. So it's kind of cherry picking what could actually be a part of it and what makes for an interesting listening experience without being grating. That's a tight rock.”
The other key part of the band is the narrative. Though the concepts of slavery and liberation are looser than they may appear, they nevertheless play an enormous part in making Zeal & Ardor come alive. Otherwise it would just be “a stream of consciousness”.
“I have a little notebook that I carry with me and sporadically write into,” says Manuel. “It's one of the few threads that hold this thing together. If I can weave even the vaguest narrative into it, it helps the whole thing. And I do that with far more care than the construction of the music.”