Smash The Status Quo: Gojira's Unstoppable Rise Through The Metal Ranks

“We are Gojira and this song is called Back. Fucking. Bone.”

Tonight Gojira, a progressive death metal band from the south of France, are playing Backbone at London’s O2 Arena. As in, the O2 Arena. The one Michael Jackson was supposed to do 50 nights at. That one.

They’re sandwiched between Like A Storm and Volbeat as support on Alter Bridge’s third arena tour of the UK. And it’s safe to say that Gojira are an anomaly here. Sure, those rockabilly wrong 'uns in Volbeat drag Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway out during Evelyn, dropping a legendary slab of grindcore into the arena mixer, but you can bet your last quid that the average Alter Bridge fan probably doesn’t own Gojira’s ‘From Mars To Sirius’ on vinyl.  

But no matter. Here, Gojira take the stage and claim it as their own. As part of a bill stacked with radio-friendly rock – that’s meant in the best possible way – they deliver the aural equivalent of having your teeth pulled out one by one by Danny Trejo without anaesthesia. And it’s wonderful.

“People are a bit, er, shocked by the intensity of the music,” laughs Mario Duplantier, the band’s drummer and one half of their sibling dream team alongside his guitarist/vocalist brother Joe. The driving force behind Gojira’s sonic steamroller, the pair are responsible for the lion’s share of the band’s writing credits and their latest record, ‘Magma’, was composed entirely by them.

And, coming from a band that can usually be found screaming about the destruction of our planet amid endless bursts of double-bass and scraping guitars, ‘Magma’ is something of a curveball. Written, as Mario so wonderfully puts it, as “a true dedication to our beloved mother”, the album is melancholy. Mid-tempo. Beautiful, even.

Patricia Rosa was, by all accounts, an exceptional mother and human being in general. When she passed away last year, the brothers were thrown into grief. Relocating from the family’s studio in Bayonne, France to Joe’s newly-built Silver Cord Studio in New York, the duo harnessed that pain on ‘Magma’. It’s a masterful opus and a fine tribute to their late mother’s legacy and influence.

“When I listen to ‘Magma’, I feel good,”  Mario says. “It’s not easy to say something after the death of someone close to you. With this album, it was help for the mourning. ‘Magma’ is us making the album we needed to make. We couldn’t think too much about the extreme death metal fans or the people who enjoy Gojira just for the death metal aspect. If you betray yourself and try to make them happy, it’s not healthy. This album is a reflection, a memento of where we were. We knew we might lose some fans.”

That brings us to the album’s main talking point among "fans of the early stuff" [roughly translated from "people who don’t like change"]. Even more noticeably than on ‘L'Enfant Sauvage’, its predecessor, ‘Magma’ isn’t really a death metal album. The weight is still there and Pray’s escalating intro and chorus are akin to The Art of Dying from ‘The Way Of All Flesh', but it is more open, more, urgh, accessible. The tracks on ‘Magma’ owe as much to ‘Chaos A.D.’ and ’Roots’-era Sepultura or Pantera as they do to Meshuggah.

Even the manner in which it was recorded is different. Silver Cord Studio sits close to Highland Park in Brooklyn and Joe now lives in New York with his family. Mario relocated there for two years with his wife and daughter, with the intention of moving there permanently: “I need to live close to my brother, because we are the two main writers in the band and we do everything together.” Surrounded by pizzerias, painters and coffee shops, the studio is a far cry from the woods of southwest France, with its buzzy atmosphere and immediacy surely playing a part in the record’s gestation.

Alongside that you have the fact that Gojira have always been a flawless live band and now they work with that in mind. They’ve given Metallica a run for their money and, lest we forget, the French foursome absolutely spanked Ghost on a UK run three years ago. On ‘Magma’, there’s a relative simplicity that’s not really present on earlier material. It’s a deliberate shift - not a money-grabbing swindle nor an attempt to fit in – and while Gojira still sound ferocious to the average Alter Bridge fan their sound has evolved along with their surroundings.

“We opened for Metallica a lot and we’ve played big festivals,” Mario says. “So we just analysed the fact that those rooms are very tough to make a clean sound in with such intense, fast music. With all the double-bass parts it sometimes makes the whole thing very muddy. It’s almost natural for us to take the direction of something clearer, with more space. The new album works better live. Finally we have songs we can play in this kind of arena and it sounds clear. It’s a good feeling.”

Still, the O2 Arena doesn’t know what to do with Gojira. Backbone is incomprehensibly heavy, but it’s the new stuff that shines. Stranded is a future anthem, The Cell balances brutality with full-bellied singalongs and Silvera’s tapped guitar bridge is more heroic than The Avengers because it doesn’t have Hawkeye in it. Dedicated fans scream along while uninitiated onlookers nod their heads. Anybody with the stage in their eyeline is a slave to the music. Even the most stereotypical, double denim-clad ‘First four Saxon albums or fuck off’ rock fan is unable to resist Gojira’s power tonight.

Just as important as Gojira’s musical muscle, though, are the messages behind the chords. The band – Joe in particular – staunchly support environmental awareness and are advocates of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. An EP was even in the works for the organisation back in 2010 when the hard drive it was stored on crashed. Of Blood And Salt, a collaboration with Devin Townsend and Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal, was the sole surviving song. The lyrics to many Gojira records point towards environmental concerns, with Silvera a notable example from ‘Magma’: “If you change yourself you change the world.” Joe has recently become vegan after a long time as a vegetarian.

“Joe has a talent to express his feelings but never make us feel guilty,” Mario says of his brother’s lifestyle switch. “He’s very smart with it. Sometimes he jokes about it when he sees us eating meat, like: ‘Oh, are you enjoying your corpse?’ I totally understand the conviction and it’s just about if it’s my moment or not to be vegan. But it’s not my time.”

Elsewhere, Mario is just as straight-talking as you’d expect. He’s not trying to paint himself as the Dalai Lama’s muse or whatever; he’s just a bloke in a band with something to say. He’s baffled by US president-elect Donald Trump’s rise to power and the reality-star-cum-politician’s belief that climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese government.

“There’s scientific proof everywhere!” he screams. “We have the internet! Everybody knows! You cannot say anything to him! He seems so rigid and lives in his own bubble, and I’m not sure if anyone can do anything for him…it’s too late. This Trump thing really disturbs me.”

At a time when bands apparently “have nothing to say”, Mario also runs through a list of like-minded artists who are willing to put their necks on the line for their beliefs, from Architects vocalist Sam Carter to Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe, who recently went to Standing Rock in order to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline.

“We know Architects, and we were really impressed by their message, the singer’s power and how he helps Sea Shepherd,” he says. “I have a lot of respect for them. Even bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Converge; there are many musicians, in different types of music, who feel this concern. Randy Blythe is very active – he’s going to North Dakota. He’s fighting every day and I have so much respect for that guy. These people really fight and sometimes they take risks and put themselves in danger, but they kill the routine.”

It may be in a different fashion, but Gojira are also taking the status quo and smashing it into tiny little bits. Their slow-burn rise has been an organic one, fuelled not by hype nor bags of cash but a dedicated fanbase. Next year’s European tour, which includes a headline slot at the 2300 capacity Forum in Kentish Town, London, is set to be a big occasion. For bands who’ve built a ladder in order to climb out of metal’s underground while still delivering punishing, uncompromising music, topping the bill at such a venue is a momentous occasion. Behemoth did it in 2014 off the back of their career-slaying album ‘The Satanist’ and now it’s Gojira’s turn.

They have been a band since 1996. For any group to survive 20 years is a feat in itself, especially given the climate post-Napster. But for an intelligent, brutal, fiendishly ferocious act like Gojira to not just survive, but thrive this far into their career? It almost beggars belief. For them to be signed to a major label like Roadrunner Records is ridiculous. For them to support Alter Bridge at the O2 Arena, for them to headline the Forum...it’s all ridiculous. ‘Magma’ is a defining moment for both Gojira and modern metal music, opening the floor to countless new opportunities. Let’s see if it can get any more ridiculous.  

Gojira Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:

Sat March 11 2017 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Academy Birmingham
Sun March 12 2017 - LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town
Tue March 14 2017 - MANCHESTER Academy
Wed March 15 2017 - NEWCASTLE O2 Academy Newcastle
Thu March 16 2017 - LEEDS O2 Academy Leeds
Fri March 17 2017 - GLASGOW O2 ABC
Sat March 18 2017 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol

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