Jean-Michel Labadie — born in France in 1974 — has been Gojira's bassist since 1998, and part of a line-up that has barely changed in almost thirty years. His function in Gojira's repertoire is more exposed than in other extreme metal bands. The group works with riffs of heavy syncopation in irregular metres, full of pauses and displaced accents; the bass has to reproduce that exact articulation together with Mario Duplantier's drums, because the mechanical weight that defines the band depends on the instruments attacking and stopping at the same point. Any imprecision undoes the construction. He was on the entire relevant discography, from Terra Incognita (2001) to Fortitude (2021), including From Mars to Sirius (2005), the record that established the band's environmental subject matter, and Magma (2016), which earned Gojira a Grammy nomination. That continuity — four musicians, almost thirty years, practically without changes — is what allowed Gojira to develop a vocabulary of its own instead of adjusting to existing formulas, and is one of the reasons the band became the one with the widest international reach ever to emerge from France.
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