Saving the planet, melting faces and dropping new album Fortitude just when we need it. Here’s why GOJIRA are our band of the decade.
…but the Duplantier brothers were never made for superstardom. They’re metal’s quintessential anti-rockstars. And yet, no band has done more to redefine this genre
Joe and Mario Duplantier were working on Gojira’s seventh album,
Fortitude, in the autumn of 2019, when the news hit the headlines: the Amazon was on fire. Not just a small, natural fire, but acres set ablaze by land-grabbing farmers and loggers, killing wildlife and endangering tribes across Brazil and other South American countries.
Most people are so numb to the 24-hour news cycle that they’d see the story and move on. Not the Duplantier brothers.
On that same day, sick to their stomachs, they took to their instruments and played with whitehot rage. The result was recent single
Amazonia, a groove metal anthem driven by a jaw harp, augmented by throat singing and inspired by the tribal percussive barrage of Roots-era Sepultura. ‘The greatest miracle is burning to the ground!’ cries Joe.
But it wasn’t enough to write a song about the Amazon crisis; they wanted to do something about it, too. Frontman Joe made phone call after phone call looking for advice on how to help, and met with indigenous leaders, before the band launched an online auction and released a limited-edition art print to raise money for an NGO, The Articulation Of Indigenous Peoples Of Brazil (APIB).
“It was very, very emotional and intense to talk to these people. I was shaking,” remembers Joe, speaking to us via a video call. “It was on Zoom. The indigenous people have to use modern tools now to communicate on their situation, and to protect themselves against criminal attacks, gunshots and fires.”
It’s a story that sets Gojira apart from every other metal band. They took a feeling of powerlessness and not only turned it into brilliant, angry music, but decisive action. It feels like they’re striving to figure out the purpose of their lives, and leave the world in a better place than they found it.
Gojira are the first band in years to challenge metal’s old guard. Not by using gimmicks, like Slipknot’s masks, Sabaton’s tanks or Ghost’s popes, but simply by being themselves.
Their unfiltered hopes and fears about living and dying blast urgently out of the music, empowering you to confront them yourself. Metallica’s Kirk Hammett called their last album, 2016’s Magma, “an incredible piece of art”.
They’ve inspired awe in the next generation, too. Black Peaks frontman Will Gardner has been a fan since hearing 2005’s crushing From Mars To Sirius: “What really got me into them in the first place was they have a uniquely powerful but deeply emotive sound – their music can be insanely heavy or super-technical, but there’s humanity at the core of it.”
Now they’re about to release Fortitude – a stunning album that values the potency of meditative chanting as much as cathartic blastbeats. Like a supporter on the sidelines of a marathon, they urge people to bear up, push past obstacles and realise their potential. Gojira are more than just the band metal needs right now. They’re the band the planet needs right now.
Gojira aren’t your typical celebrities, and they know it. Joe is first to join today’s video call, while younger brother/ drummer Mario keeps us waiting. “He’s such a rock star,” quips
Joe, before phoning France’s mild-mannered answer to Axl
Rose to see where he is.
They will never have stories about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but they’re interesting precisely because they don’t put up a front; they are their authentic selves. Modest but self-possessed, Joe takes the lead and is first to answer questions directed at them both, while Mario shades in the colour of forgotten details.
The pair formed Godzilla in France in 1996, when Joe was 19 and Mario was just 14. Fired up by the gruesome death metal they heard blasting out of the US underground, they wanted to make music that measured up to their heroes’ standards. Brutal Abortion, Rigor Mortis and Bleeding are some of the song titles on Gojira’s four early demos.
“We were collectively in that energy, listening to a lot of Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse and Death, and we had this absolute fascination for this
“WE HAD A FASCINATION FOR BLOODY THINGS AND DEATH”
JOE DUPLANTIER
world: music that would talk about bloody things and death, and ghosts and fear. It was almost like trying to understand the rules of a game; we were trying to fit, in that world, for a little bit. But then very quickly, we understood how we could create our own world by breaking these limits,” explains Joe. “Mario was taking it super, super-seriously. He had long hair…”
“…Yeah, my dream was just to be in Tampa, Florida”, enthuses Mario, “and going to the Morrisound Studio [where Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and Death recorded seminal albums], because all the production that came from that studio was amazing.”
Released in 2001, debut album Terra Incognita marked that shift into their own world. By this time they had swapped original bassist Alexandre Cornillon for Jean-michel Labadie, changed their name to Gojira, and were merrily subverting death metal’s tropes. Bludgeoning opener Clone
featured clean singing and warned against interfering with Mother Nature. Instrumentals foregrounded primitive percussion and yelling. There was even a song called Love.
“We sort of had an epiphany,” says Joe. “And we realised, ‘OK, it’s OK to call a song Love.’ It’s about love, it’s death metal, but it works, actually, because love is freaking powerful,
and can also be destructive. And so we got rid of all the notions of what is acceptable or unacceptable in our music pretty early on.”
Exploring existential themes, each record includes passages, interludes or short songs that complement the onslaught: unexpected sounds in the gaps of their death metal vertebrae. Yet The Chant, from new album Fortitude, still comes as a surprise. A quasi-dub rock song punctuated by a laid-back vocal refrain, it’s further than they’ve ever gone before.
“The Chant expresses our intention that we put behind every song, which is an intention of unifying and compassion, and this chant is clearly a mantra or a prayer addressed to the sky, or addressed to the Unknown, or whatever the universe is,” explains Joe. “It’s very indigenous, in a way. And we have something indigenous in our music.”
Where does that indigenous quality come from?
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I think we were taught, through example, by our parents, to think outside the box. We had an Azorean, American mom that lived in France who was a yoga teacher, who was speaking differently to all the other moms in the village,