Joe Duplantier

Joe Duplantier — born in France in 1976 — is the vocalist, guitarist and principal composer of Gojira, the French metal band with the widest reach in history. He founded the group with his brother Mario in Bayonne, in south-western France, in 1996 — a region with no tradition in the genre. Gojira built a vocabulary of its own: riffs of heavy syncopation in irregular metres, guitar techniques producing sounds of almost mechanical origin, and structures that move away from the death metal formula without abandoning its weight. His lyrics are what set the band apart in the field. Duplantier writes about ecology, species extinction, whaling and the human relationship with the planet — environmental subject matter treated seriously, not as a pose. From Mars to Sirius (2005) is the record that established this, and the band has kept the subject for two decades, supporting concrete environmental organisations. Magma (2016), written after the death of the Duplantier brothers' mother, is the group's most personal and restrained work — and the one that earned it a Grammy nomination. In 2024, Gojira became the first metal band to perform at an Olympic opening ceremony, playing at the Paris Games with a performance on the French Revolution — a moment in which a historically marginal genre occupied the most visible stage in the world.