If you hadn’t heard about new Gojira album, you must live under the biggest rock in the world. Album scheduled to be released on 17 June is getting more and more attention and hype around it. Band also contribute to this situation, by releasing new videos, and playing a lots of gigs. One of them happened in Kraków, 1 June. Both our redactors had a chance to talk with Joe Duplantier, lead singer and guitarist of the band.
Deathmagnetic.pl: Good to see you in Poland, how’s your trip?
Joe: Good, thank you.
D: In a couple of days you’ll be releasing your new album. We had a chance to listen to it and in our opinion it’s a very bold, challenging and also very enjoyable record, but don’t you think that die-hard fans will appreciate the new record?
J: You know, we love our die-hard friends, we really do. But we can’t base our life on them, so yeah, of course, some people might be disappointed to lose their dear “death metal pet”, but we’re not their pet (laugh). We’re a rock band, or a metal band, whatever you called it, we’re somewhere in between. This is what’s all about when you play that music, is to feel alive and enjoy yourself, to push the boundaries, to challenge yourself and your listeners. We’re not scared to lose them, we’re bit sad in advance, to lose some of our fans, but it’s gonna happen anyway, what you gonna do. We’re getting older and we don’t have energy to play death metal any more.
D: With your lyrics in your previous works, you’ve touched topics that are very unusual for a death metal – environment, ecological stuff. Will you continue with this topic on Magma?
J: Magma it’s a logical evolution to previous records, in a sense that the way I approached the lyrics I always the same thing, process. You know, when you’re alone in your bedroom, playing guitar, thinking about stuff, you have things in your mind, something is troubling you. I’m that kind of guy, I’m worried about things. I care about what’s gonna happen with this humanity, what’s gonna happen to the planet. I know that eventually the Sun will grow so big that it will destroy the Earth, and the whole Solar System is bound to disappear anyway, but then I read books about Buddhism philosophy, and it’s all about the moment, the energy of now, that’s all there is. When you think about the past it’s the now, when you think about the future it’s the now. So instead of thinking “Is it worth protecting this planet, because it’s gonna disappear anyway” sometimes I’m troubled just by the way people behave directly now, on this planet, and energy it creates for ever and ever. On a certain dimension there is no time and space. Everything we do in life it’s sacred, every little thought, every word, every gesture. You we’re just music band, we just play music, but with all this shit in my head, I have to scream it into microphone. Some people make a big deal out of it. I’m just a stupid singer with things in my head, just screaming this things into the microphone. On this record we grew up, we’re less angry, more at peace. I would say that this record is more like a statement what we are today musically and lyric-wise, it’s really whatever is in our head. Magma is all the emotions inside, creating this magma of emotions and sensations. It’s very complex.
D: Magma, the title, is it exactly what you said, that we have it inside of us? Is that the origin? Could you say more about this how you came up with the title?
J: To be really precise and to tell you the whole story. We were jamming this riff, the opening riff for song Magma. The way we were playing it with my brother, staring at each other, and he said “it feels like I don’t know, like magma, like something boiling” and I couldn’t agree more. That was it, this riff, the sound we were looking for. Since the beginning of the band, twenty years ago, we were constantly trying to reproduce the heaviness of the mountain, or the crushing aspect of the wave, the lava, the volcano. We always had this images in our heads, when we created music. We called the riff magma, and the idea was so strong, that it became the working title for the song. And then, later on, we were thinking about the title for the record, and I was like “Dude, it’s Magma”. You see, it’s not like we sit on the table with the tie, it just happens like that.
D: The one of your previous works “From Mars to Sirius” had it’s lyrics somehow connected. Could you say that it’s the same for “Magma”?
J: It’s true for “From Mars to Sirius”, as the title says – from A to B, from this place to this place, and then you have a record with like a kind of a journey, so in that sense we can call it a concept album. With Magma… I don’t know if we can call it a concept album, I think it doesn’t matter how we call it. But certainly this energy, energy going through the entire record, even thou you have songs like “Stranded”, “Silvera” and later on “Magma”, “Pray”, or the opening song “The Shooting Star”, they’re very different, you go from one world to another, and we like that to, it’s a lot of contrast. The cover for the record is this volcano, the sun which represents life, it’s simple. Actually it’s funny, I see people thinking we have some secret society behind us, like illuminati. I read comments sometimes on Facebook, and I’m like “WHAT?”. The eye is the consciousness, the pyramid is knowledge, civilization, the strong base, the sun is the life. This are universal symbols. It’s true that in one video there was this triangle with the eye, but I didn’t do this video. For us it’s all very simple, we’re red necks, coming from the countryside. We think about the stars, we’re amazed by the beauty of things, when we travel to countries we’re like “Oh you see this people, they are like this and that”. We’re very naive and very childish, and all our symbol, things you’ll find in our music are very simple, there is nothing to dig. This album is just magma, so in that sense it is a concept album., it’s all magma. Cause it’s metal.
D: You, your brother and also your sister are not only musicians, but also artists. You did most of the covers for the albums, your brother is a painter, and your sister is a photographer. I want to ask you how do you connect being painter and musician, does it complete you as artist, or those are two different things.
J: They’re different, but the same in the same time. We grew up in old house, that you’ll actually see in detail in our next video, we’re about to release along with the album. It’s gonna be very interested video, and you’ll see may details, and full house at the end. It’s a very touching video. We grew up in that house, our dad is still drawer, so we grew up with this vibe, this old house, if you punch the wall and make a hole, nobody will notice. I loved growing up in this shitty house with spiders, rats, and lot of freedom. House was full of paints, pencils, all that stuff, if we wanted to create, we could create, if we want to play music – we can play music.I want to thank my parents for that, because they offered us great freedom. We grew up really organic, naturally, taking pictures, painting. At some point my sister got really into photography, so „yeah, sure take one of rooms, put cartons, and develop your own thing”. My dad showed us the way of working hard, he waked up at 5 at the morning, work all day, and eventually got really successful at what he did, but in the very very humble way. He was also building everything in the house – tables, chairs, selves, fixing the floor. So he showed us a great example – yeah, you can paint, you can create your own stuff, you just have to do it. My sister started to paint and taking pictures, me and my brother too. We grew up with art, so it’s all for me, it’s this magma of creation. I always did all the covers, and every three year I start to draw again.
D: Can you tell us how does it look, how do you get ideas for covers, and how technical aspect looks like?
J: For me, and it’s actually funny because you asked me about link between musician and artist, a lot of times when I write lyrics, I also do small sketches. For example, I was writing lyrics for one of the songs on „The Way of All Flesh” and it turned out to be „Wolf Down the Earth”. To wolf down means to swallow it all with one gulp. So for me this image of swallowing Earth was good picture of humanity. It started with the sketch, I was drawing the small world and this big mouth, and then I came up with the lyrics. The same thing happen for other songs. „From Mars to Sirius” for example I had the vision in my head, I see this white, like a gentle treatment, I see a whale, and I do those sketches with brush and Chinese ink. Usually the idea comes very quickly, ant then it’s a long way to look very nice, so usually I do it fifty, sixty, seventy times before it looks perfect. I like it that way, away from technology, computer,
D: Are you solitary one with doing the covers, or do you communicate with the band somehow?
J: I think I’m the one giving the direction lyric-wise and meaning-wise, but I always check in with my bandmates, make sure they’re cool with that. I’m not writing a song about „I love nazi, are you cool with that?”, I’m more like „The Earth is beautiful, we should protect it” and they are like „Yeah, cool”. They agree with me all the times, and they’re cool with my ideas. I send them a little sketch of cover, and they point me if something is weird.
D: You said previously that you’re not hiding deep meaning behind your music, like „illuminati” and things like this, that you’re not dwelling in the deep. Is the same for the covers you made?
J: When I said we’re simple red necks, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful towards red necks. I think there’s a truth in pagan history, in nature, people that love in the wild. I think it’s deeper than the putting hidden messages about some sort of secret society. There’s something deeper. For example, „The Way of All Flesh” cover is full of details, like you see this two drops coming towards the heart? In „The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” they say that after the body dies, there’s a three days of internal process happening inside, and there is this white and red drop presenting mental and physical strength. So I did my homework for this one, but the flying whale… it’s just flying whale.
