Zeal & Ardor Hands “Devil Is Fine” to Carpenter Brut

Zeal & Ardor has handed “Devil Is Fine” to Carpenter Brut for a remix, out now via MVKA Records. The song gave Gagneux’s 2017 debut its name, and for a lot of listeners it still serves as the entry point to the project.

The pairing holds together better than most cross-genre bills. Gagneux built Zeal & Ardor on a deliberate collision between African American spirituals and black metal, two traditions that both treat the voice as something carrying weight beyond the human. Carpenter Brut works from a different angle: the French producer’s music is distorted, cinematic and knowingly retro-futurist, closer to a soundtrack for a film that was never made.

Remixes frequently amount to release-cycle filler, a way of extending a song’s life without saying anything new about it. This one has a clearer reason to exist. It moves a track built on historical antagonism into the hands of a producer whose vocabulary is entirely synthetic, European and of the present tense.

There is also a practical logic. Metal and electronic music have traded ideas and audiences for decades, and the people who book festivals have noticed. A remix like this reaches both rooms at once.

What matters more is what Gagneux hears in a collaborator who generates heaviness with machines rather than volume. Zeal & Ardor has always been an argument between incompatible sources. This version adds a third voice to it.