Written and recorded after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, Zeal & Ardor’s Wake of a Nation captures bandleader Manuel Gagneux’s reaction to the horrific event—and solidarity with the global protests that followed—using his signature mix of black metal and African American spirituals. “This is not a very optimistic record,” Gagneux tells Apple Music in the only interview he’s giving to discuss the release. “It’s my biggest fear that these atrocities will just become the new status quo, and that’s pretty much the picture I tried to paint with the songs.” The EP’s title is a play on The Birth of a Nation, the infamous 1915 silent film that doubles as an ode to the Ku Klux Klan. “It was really a piece of KKK propaganda,” says Gagneux, who resides in Switzerland and is the son of an African American mother and a Swiss father. “Having something die in the wake of that movement is the thought behind the EP name.” There’s one more thing Gagneux would like listeners to know about Wake of a Nation: “I would really love to not have to make another one of these.” Read his comments on each track below. Vigil “This is actually the first song I wrote post-George Floyd, and it’s literally just about that situation and how it ate into me. I basically took all of that anger and sadness that I felt at that time and put it into words and sad melodies. It pretty much gives the whole context of what’s to come.” Tuskegee “It’s about the syphilis experiments that were done on these Black men who were promised health care, but actually they were just studied to see how the development of the disease would pan out if untreated. I picked that topic because obviously it's about Black people, but it’s also something that's not really given too much attention and merits a whole bunch of anger. And that's why it's also the most angry song on the EP.” At the Seams “This is kind of a summation of all the tracks. While all the other songs are looking to the past, this one is kind of glancing at the future and things to come. That’s why it’s both a soft affair as well as a very abrasive and aggressive one at the same time. It’s one of the sadder ones, but there’s also a harsher tone to it.” I Can’t Breathe “When I saw the protests in the US, I just felt stuck here. There were protests in Switzerland, but you gotta kind of question the importance or relevance of protests in Switzerland regarding American affairs. So when I wrote this song, I imagined people could play it at really high volumes at protests and maybe get all riled up. It’s kind of a continuation of our initial recipe, but instead of using field hollers, it’s got a hodgepodge of protest chants with an underlying industrial clipping or Death Grips-style beat.” Trust No One “This one is the least political of the bunch. In all honesty, I just wanted to have a doom-sludge song with 808s in it. I’m not going to pretend there’s anything deeper to it than that. I tried to fit it into the overall theme lyrically, and the idea of ‘trust no one’ is as vague as you can get with that. From there it just felt very forced, so I figured why not have a ‘fun song’ in the mix, and just leave it at that. I didn’t force any atrocities into it.” Wake of a Nation “This is a very stripped-down song because we wanted to—as well as we could—go back to our roots, which is field hollers. But basically it imagines if Black people from back in the slavery days were to witness what’s happening now. Maybe this would be the kind of hopeful chant they would be hollering to themselves in the field—that the king is dead. I’m not talking about literal murder, but not having him president would be nice.”