Zeal And Ardor: Wake Of A Nation (Clear Vinyl)

Zeal & Ardor’s Wake Of A Nation arrived on 23 October 2020 as a six-track EP, released through MVKA. It followed Stranger Fruit and landed as one of the project’s most direct and confrontational statements, with the Bandcamp page crediting all titles to Manuel Gagneux and listing Marc Obrist and Manuel Gagneux as recording personnel, Marco von Allmen on drums, and Will Putney handling mixing and mastering. 

This EP hits differently from the full-length albums because it feels less like world-building and more like an immediate response. The material was written in the wake of the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd, and that urgency is all over the record. Instead of leaning into a slow-burn conceptual atmosphere, Wake Of A Nation is sharper, angrier, and more stripped to the nerve. It still carries the signature Zeal & Ardor fusion of black metal, gospel, spirituals, noise, and industrial-edged heaviness, but here those elements feel weaponised rather than exploratory. 

What makes the EP so strong is that it never sounds like a statement piece at the expense of the music. Tracks like “Vigil”and “Tuskegee” carry real force, while “I Can’t Breathe” is brutally concise and impossible to miss. “Trust No One,”which had appeared before in the Zeal & Ardor orbit, takes on extra weight in this context, and the title track closes things with a sense of confrontation rather than release. At just six songs, it is a short record, but it leaves a mark because there is no wasted movement anywhere on it. 

For Rue Morgue Records purposes, Wake Of A Nation is essential because it shows Zeal & Ardor at their most immediate and politically charged. Devil Is Fine was the breakthrough, Stranger Fruit expanded the sound, but this EP is the moment where Manuel Gagneux channels that whole aesthetic into something raw, furious, and uncomfortably current. It is not just an interlude release. It stands as one of the most potent things the project has done.