Zetra: “We can have fun with this, but it’s never a joke. It’s not silly. We’re not f*cking about”

• Get your limited-edition Kerrang! x Zetra zine

Who are Zetra? That’s even more complicated. Not least because, at first, it seems the curtain’s dropped. The pair we meet in the grand environs of London’s St James’ Park, almost in the shade of Buckingham Palace, in the final days of summer are not the same pair photographed for Kerrang!’s cover. Well, they are, but there’s no make-up, no staffs, no leather.

One wears a Metallica shirt, the other a baseball cap. They introduce themselves by their actual names, Adam and Jordan. Jordan’s even brought his dog, a delightful little black terrier who flips from curious sweetheart to Begbie from Trainspotting whenever any of King Charles’ ducks who call this park their home get too close.

We’ll be honest: this all seems too… normal.

“David Bowie didn’t do interviews pretending to be a spaceman,” laughs Jordan. “We never wanted to go down that route where we're pretending to be Zetra in interviews. But on the flip-side, we never want to make it so anonymous that the anonymity is the story and not Zetra. The story has to be Zetra. The focus of everything has to be Zetra.”

Zetra are very good at this Bowie bluff. Which is why, over the course of a couple of hours in civvies, talking normally with them, you come away having learned only what they want you to. Often people mistakenly expect them to be a black metal band. Here, a worry that The Wizard Of Oz is about to show you exactly how his machine works is similarly evaporated when the pair of them get going.

“We're Jordan and Adam. That's fine. We're not trying to hide it, and that way there's no big unmasking at the end of it,” shrugs Jordan. “You can find out about us, it's fine, but we're not going to be talking about ourselves outside of what we do in Zetra. That's not something we're interested in. Anything else is just a distraction.”

“It’s fun, the anonymity, but we never wanted to pretend to be a character like that in interviews,” says Adam. “When we're Zetra, and we're not talking, and we’re onstage or in a video, then we’re Zetra. But there’s a separation there. I’m not gonna pretend to be some demon all the time. I don't feel like either of us are gonna give too much away…”

Yeah, but what is Zetra?

“It’s a muse,” says Adam, after a moment. “It's an inspiration. It's that idea of something's there talking to you. We just consider that to be the spirit of Zetra. Whenever we get ideas, we always listen to the ideas, and we always try the ideas, and they always work. They literally always work. So we always considered it very, not mystical, but outside of ourselves.

“We don’t question it. To the point where it could be the worst idea in the world, the thing that just turns everyone off, but it’ll just feel right to go with this inspiration and not second-guess it. But it always works. We can’t explain it.”

“We've always tried to retain that separation of us as humans,” says Jordan. “Yes, we can have fun with this, but it's never a joke. It's not silly. We might be ridiculous, but it's never silly. It's told with a straight face.

“We're not fucking about. It's serious stuff. Very serious stuff.”

Even in their earliest form, though, Zetra were a cosmos away. Calling themselves “song-people”, their vision was more of a warped blend of pop and art-rock, with dungeon synth dressing.

“At first, we thought, ‘Maybe it's something like The Dandy Warhols meets ZZ Top’s Eliminator and Afterburner albums,” says Adam. “Those records are very much drum machine sequence-based, and there's guitar, the songs have always got a killer hook. It just started to make sense when we started slowing everything down and getting way, way heavier and way dirgier, upping the fuzz and pushing the synths into Gary Numan territory.”

When it clicked, ahead of their earliest shows, including a socially-distanced performance at Camden’s Black Heart, at which the vibe was enhanced by the audience having to sit in church pews provided by the venue to keep on-side of COVID laws, they knew they’d found themselves. It was the personification of it all that tied everything together.

“The moment that Zetra came from being this collection of songs, this different sound, this direction we were heading in, was when it came to us that we should wear corpsepaint,” says Adam. “We decided we should make this a theatrical show. We should make sure that there's a strong, dark aesthetic to this, which doesn't necessarily come naturally to it, if you listen to the music.

“We still get a lot of people who go, ‘This doesn't make sense.’ We've always considered that to be a lack of imagination. It's just a new synthesis of two things that we think are super-fucking-cool coming together, and now you've got a new thing. Some people fucking hate it, but a lot of people fucking love it.”

The duo's latest transmission, their long-awaited debut full-length, shows the scope of what Zetra can do and what they can be. It’s also a new chapter, with Jordan admitting that they went into writing with nothing left over, no spares. Instead, they wrote from fresh, sending ideas back and forth to one another (“We never jam, ever, God no”), with Jordan producing. In their bubble, they continued to figure themselves out, allowing trusted outside hands in for the first time to master the finished product, and to collaborate on videos.

Thematically, it studies dark and light. Or, that’s what you can take from what you’re given. It begins with more violent, angry titles: Suffer Eternally, Sacrifice and Starfall, featuring roars from Svalbard singer Serena Cherry. In the middle third, you have Shatter The Mountain. As it draws to an end, there’s Gaia, the Greek mother Goddess of the Earth, the idea of a force in nature bigger and more pure than ourselves. At the album’s end, there’s tracks called Moonfall and Miracle, both reflecting something of the transition of their titles.

When asked, though, the David Bowie ambiguity comes down. Jordan says a chunk of inspiration came from the VHS cover of the 1988 Masters Of The Universe movie, featuring Swedish beefcake Dolph Lundgren's He-Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor, looming over a city – “a beauty and beast thing”. But there’s not much more that’s forthcoming.

Without noticing, Kerrang! quickly find ourselves in the questioning spotlight. When we volunteer our own thoughts, that it’s a journey from the boiling anger of the start, to the acceptance of the end, with some sort of resolution bigger than a protagonist might have imagined they were looking for at first, both raise their eyebrows, with Adam simply replying, “Glad you think so.”

Alright, Aleister Crowley…

“But that's exactly what we love! We love people coming out with ideas of what it's trying to say,” he responds with a laugh. “There was a react video a little while ago where this guy was talking about Starfall. He was dissecting it line by line, and saying, ‘Maybe now they’re saying there's hope, and then maybe we're going to make it. But then in this, and they seem to be saying a lot, without really saying very much at all.’ That’s great.”

“We've got a Discord with a bunch of people on there that are constantly trying to pick out meaning, pick out thoughts,” picks up Jordan. “They look at the videos and go, ‘Maybe this means this.’ They’ll see a pomegranate in the video and try to work it out: ‘Why are they biting straight into a pomegranate? This is insane – they must be trying to say this and this…’

“We don't get involved and tell them they're right and wrong,” he chuckles, proudly, “but it's really interesting to see the things they come out with.”

“We’re not trying to force a story down anyone's throat,” says Adam. “We're throwing ideas out. We're putting ideas out there and letting people sit with it, and they can decide what they want to do.”

Again, The Thin White Duke comes up, along with a touch of magic.

“What were those cards that Bowie and Brian Eno made?” asks Jordan. “It's that, it’s throwing out a card and going: ‘That's a bit of nonsense,’ but at the same time, that's kind of triggered this thing. It's almost a tool for getting other people's imaginations going. It's like tarot cards. It's not necessarily about an objective magic or force or anything that's making these cards come up. It's about looking at it and almost being a psychological reflection on yourself and that helping you make decisions, helping you make choices and thinking.

“While undoubtedly, when we're writing these songs, there's ideas in mind, there's themes in mind, there's experiences, your own experience, but we love leaving it up to your interpretation. To look at that and go, ‘Oh, cool. Maybe it's this, or maybe it's this.’ That's great, man.”

Now, Zetra’s set-up in bigger venues has had a focus on using a huge backdrop to draw the eye to the centre of the stage. Such a simple thing, as with so much magic, it makes any enormous space that might otherwise swallow up two figures seem insignificant. It’s all part of creating the right environment, so they can draw you into their world when you see them the right way. Even as the band get bigger, the prospect of expanding the show is a tricky one. They’ve had dancers before, and would increase such an element. But the bubble remains the same: the two.

“When I go and see Depeche Mode, I want to see Depeche Mode [from 1988 live document] Live At The Rose Bowl,” says Jordan. “It's the synths, it's the big show, the lights and everything from that show. I don't want to see Depeche Mode suddenly with a live drummer and four other keyboard players that aren't in the band, and some extra guitar stuff. I don't want to see Dave Gahan getting all riled up because there's a drum kit behind him. That isn't Depeche Mode. And for us, I feel like, why would we change what we're doing when it's been created completely for two people?”

Why, indeed? One of the things that isn’t intentionally ambiguous and open-ended about Zetra is that they know what they’re doing, what to tease, what to show, and what to deflect when questioned about. The album finishes with what Jordan likens to final music from a film that implies everything’s okay. Even this is muddied, though, by the fact that the CD version has an extra bit at the end, a question mark made of dark dungeon synth.

So, what is Zetra? Whatever you think it is, based on whatever they want you to know, mostly. The puzzle is all part of it. They’ll tell you about the music, about what drives them, about creating, but like the tarot, the meaning depends on you. What they will say, clearly and without any ambiguity, is that they have a sincere desire that what they do should be against the mundane, the ordinary, the stuff you know.

Even appearing in civvies, even using their own names, they’re smart enough to know how much is enough in both directions. As we depart, the intrigue of Zetra has only grown.

“I think there always will be mystique, because we're not pretending to know all the answers about Zetra,” says Jordan. “We're not pretending to come here and say, ‘Oh, you want to talk about Zetra? Well, let me tell you everything.’ It's still being unravelled to us. The story and where it's going and each new chapter, we don't necessarily know where that's going, but we trust that it's going to go exactly the way that it needs to go.

“We're not pretending to have all the answers. We're just telling you our experience with Zetra and how it's affected us and how we've come to where we are, but not necessarily where it's going, where it's going to end up. So there's always going to be a mystique, even to us.

“That makes it fun for us, too.”

Get your limited-edition Kerrang! x Zetra zine now. Zetra's self-titled album is out September 13 via Nuclear Blast.