The stylistic jump between Gojira's 2012 album L'Enfant sauvage and 2016 album Magma was a pretty large one. Magma used a ton more clean vocals, lighter atmospheres, and experimentation that took the band in a direction previously unheard. Some loved it, some didn't – it grew on me as time went on and I find myself listening to it more and more often lately.
So what's the plan for Gojira's future? Joseph Duplantier isn't sure, as he explains to the below interview with Aggressive Tendencies. It could have more clean vocals, but it could also have "more high-pitched or whatever" vocals too! Duplantier says the clean vocals have been a long time coming, and if he didn't start singing on Gojira's new material, "I would probably quit doing what I do, 'cause it wouldn't be interesting anymore."
"I still like to scream. Sometimes there's a song, and I'm, like, 'I'm gonna sing on that.' It's, like, this amazing melody. And then I think about all our fans: 'They're gonna be so disappointed.' And then I'm, like, 'No, don't think about them. Just think about what you're doing here and try to be honest with yourself.' And then I go for it, and very surprising things happen. But sometimes I just start screaming my ass off in a different way than before too — it's more high-pitched or whatever — and that's interesting too. So I really honestly don't know what's gonna happen on the next record. We'll see."
He also discusses the band moving away from death metal as time went on. He says it's always going to be a part of Gojira, but like an old, it sort of fades away.
"It's exactly like a friendship. You have a friend when you're a kid, and it's a friend that matters for life. You will always remember that friend, you still love that friend, but you moved to another city with your parents, so you don't see that friend anymore, but it's still part of your story, your structure, and without that friend you wouldn't be the same person. We still love death metal — it's part of us — and we don't feel like we turned our back on what we were. It's just part of our life was filled with death metal and that was our excitement at the time, and then we discovered new things and then we changed and then we grew up. Some elements are still there, but, yeah, the music changed with us, and that's the beauty of doing this. Being a musician, it's like you're exploring."
[via Blabbermouth]
