At 39 years of age, Joe Duplantier has been playing music for over half his life.
His most notable work has come under the banner of Gojira, perhaps France’s most celebrated metal band, which Duplantier started while still in his teens. Slowly but surely, Gojira have built up a cult status on an international scale, brandishing a sound that is brutal and biting yet also able to maintain a balance between brains and brawn. At Joe’s side the entire time has been his younger brother, Mario, on drums. Despite the age gap between them, the frontman is thankful to have had his sibling in tow for the band’s lifespan.
“I think he and I were both going to end up playing music, no matter what,” Duplantier says. “I started to play music without him when I was in high school – there’s a five-year age difference between us, so he was ten when I started playing music. What can you do with a ten-year-old? The drumsticks were bigger than he was! By the time he was 12, he started to pick up drums a bit and he started to get really good at it – we couldn’t believe how quickly he was picking things up. Soon enough, he’d proven himself and I thought he was ready to start playing music with me. That was 20 years ago, and we’ve been in bands together ever since. It’s become our lives – it’s all that we know. I feel like it has become the engine room as far as Gojira is concerned. Music is very important to our family.”
2016 has seen the release of Magma, the sixth studio album from Gojira and one that marks a significant change in the band’s sound. Though still borrowing heavily from progressive and groove-oriented influences, the album also forges further into a more melodic approach to alternative metal. It’s not necessarily something that is going to sit well with diehards – but then again, Duplantier doesn’t have any time for people like that.
“The more that people hate this record, the better,” he says. It comes with a laugh, but the laugh seems a little ambiguous – it’s clearly meant to indicate that he is joking, but it also comes across as a nervousness from believing such a seismic, defiant statement.
“We’ve always released records that were more death metal-inclined, and we built up an audience that was primarily people that exclusively listen to death metal,” Duplantier continues. “As we have gradually moved away from that specific sound, we have had those kind of fans turn on us. We’re more interested in mixing heavy metal with rock music now, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s opened up new avenues for us artistically. We’re experimenting a lot more. We’re evolving as a band. It’s always going to hurt to see those negative comments from the death metal lovers, but we’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s impossible to move forward and still be able to please everyone.”
Magma was recorded in Gojira’s second home of New York City, where they relocated in order to focus more on that continental market. Several delays pushed the album’s progress back further, including the death of the Duplantier siblings’ mother. The end result, however, is more than worth the wait. This is particularly apparent when one notes just how much the band – completed by lead guitarist Christian Andreu and bassist Jean-Michel Labadie – has made the effort to push forward in an inventive and engaging way. For Joe, this came in the form of focusing on his singing – and that’s meant literally, as being the lead singer in a metal band doesn’t always necessitate doing what’s typically defined as singing.
“When we made our previous album [2012’s L’Enfant Sauvage], I wanted to try singing more and blending that with the screaming and harsh vocals,” he says. “During the pre-production, I was constantly trying to figure out which arrangements would suit which kind of vocals. At first, I tried to compromise by doing dual tracking – one of me singing and one screaming – and having them run at the same time. That’s not exactly what we ended up going with for the finished product, but I think that’s what sparked the idea that it was a possibility as far as being a vocalist was concerned. That was a few years ago, and my interest in singing has only grown stronger.
“We’re very excited about this record. We feel in tune with it – we feel as though it’s really us coming through in the music that made it onto the album. We’re very interested to see people’s reactions to it. This is an album we’re very ready to share with people, both in terms of them listening to it and people coming to see it played live.”
Gojira’sMagma is out now through Roadrunner/Warner.
