Joe Duplantier

Joseph Andrew Duplantier (born 19 October 1976) is a French and American musician, best known as the vocalist, guitarist, and lyricist of heavy metal band Gojira. He is also a record producer and environmental activist.

Duplantier was born in Paris and grew up in Ondres. He was raised in an environment where music and the arts held a prominent place. He learned to play the guitar at fourteen and formed his first band in high school. He studied art and began working as a graphic designer before co-founding the death metal band Godzilla with his younger brother Mario in 1996. He was also a founding member, along with his brother, of the band Empalot. Godzilla changed its name to Gojira, which rose from obscurity to international prominence. He is also the former bassist of Cavalera Conspiracy, to which Gloria and Max Cavalera invited him.

Duplantier holds US citizenship by birthright, which led him to settle in New York City in 2011. He owns a recording studio called Silver Cord Studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Throughout his career, he affirmed his concern for nature and animals. He is engaged in thinking about ecological problems and environmental protection, reflected in his lyrics. Duplantier also expressed his support for indigenous peoples in Brazil through fundraising efforts.

Early life Duplantier was born on 19 October 1976 in Paris. His mother, Patricia (née Rosa; 6 October 1950 – 5 July 2015), was American. His father, Dominique Duplantier, born in 1945 in Bordeaux, is a French painter and architectural drafter, a former student in history at the Faculté des Lettres (Faculty of Letters) and engraving at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Due to this, Duplantier (and his brother) holds dual French and US citizenship. He is franco-américain (French-American).

In 1977, the family left Paris and moved to Ondres, a small seaside town in the Landes department, in an old house with no heating system dating from the Louis XV period. He was raised there, in southwest France, near the Basque country, at north of Biarritz. and his brother, Mario, was born in 1981. His mother, manifesting a marked interest in art activities, was a yoga and dance teacher in the periphery of Bayonne. The work of precision and patience of his father, who got up every day at 4:30 am to work, had a significant influence on him.

When Duplantier was thirteen, he discovered New York City for the first time, accompanied by his cousin during a visit to his family in Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg. Greeted at the airport by his maternal uncle, it was then that he realized how attracted he was to the city. He began playing his mother's classical guitar, which only had two strings. He experienced bullying at school. With his brother, he was dismayed by the household and industrial wastes and dead animals stranded in the protected area of the dunes of Ondres. He continued his interests in metal music with Master of Puppets, then Sepultura, and seeking to define his own musical identity he pursued death metal through the band Death. P4 was also mentioned in a thread of a French metal website (Vs-webzine), citing the band as "pre-Godzilla" and improvizing in Christian Andreu's garage. When he was a young man, he distinguished himself by picking up trash on a beach and scattering it in the parking lot of the mayor's office, attracting the attention of the local media in France. Duplantier said: "I found it so weird; people aren't bothered by what's on the beach, but when it's on a parking lot, it becomes a problem". He recalled building cabins in the forest as a child. Then, at the age of twenty-four, he decided to return to the forest and built a new one where he would live with his girlfriend for two years without income or electricity. Gojira's 2001 debut studio album, Terra Incognita, was written during this experience. According to Duplantier, the band's primary goal was to maintain complete autonomy and "total control over the band's music". He has been responsible for the artworks for Gojira's albums, each representing an idea that he spontaneously and minimalistically designs. In 2008, Randy Blythe flew from the US to France to record his vocals on and was hosted at Duplantier's home in the southwest for a week. In 2012, he also occasionally played drums in live performances when he and his brother switched places.

A week before the release of Gojira's Magma, he expressed his disillusionment when he said that the metal genre did not receive the attention of the main French-language media. Throughout 2016 and 2017, the French press would publish after scrutiny that Gojira ended up being one of the largest exporters of music from France, leading the country's metal category. In 2017, Gojira performed two consecutive sold-out concerts at the Paris' Olympia, at a time when the band was at its peak of popularity. Regarding the band's first-ever Grammy nomination at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, Duplantier said: "We started out playing thrash and pretty intense death metal, tracks over which I've been screaming for 20 years, so I didn't expect any reward." and earned them global chart success through the album revolving around Duplantier's committed and positive lyrics. The band was scheduled for its first headlining arena tour in Europe and the UK in 2022, including the 20,300-capacity Accor Arena in Paris (it was postponed to 2023 due to COVID-19 restrictions).

Duplantier portrayed the band's lifestyle as "marginal", comprising musicians who are more creative than "self-destructive" and more interested in art than partying. with a total of 100,000 tickets sold.

Empalot

Duplantier, along with his brother and friends, was also a member of a festive, theatrical fusion-genre band called Empalot, with which he toured France from 1999 to 2004. For him, the project was synonymous with fits of laughter and happiness.

Cavalera Conspiracy

In 2007, Max and Igor Cavalera initially asked Labadie, bassist of Gojira, to fill in on bass for their band, Cavalera Conspiracy. However, Labadie was busy with prior commitments, including Gojira. Instead, Duplantier became the band's bassist through the influence of Max Cavalera's wife, Gloria. Playing Sepultura's "Territory" with the Cavalera brothers during the first jam session in the presence of all the families left him indelible memories. Moreover, while working with the band on their debut album, he experienced a diametrically different studio process, as the songs composed in the morning were recorded "spontaneously" in the afternoon. Max Cavalera regretted that Duplantier did not appear on the band's second album, Blunt Force Trauma. Cavalera said, "He is a great musician, with a lot of good ideas."

Silver Cord Studio Duplantier is the owner of Silver Cord Studio, a recording studio located in Ridgewood, Queens, New York, which he designed himself. After the experience of Gojira's recording studio in the Landes, called Le Studio des Milans, Duplantier sought to continue producing albums independently and planned to create new premises for the band in the US. A friend brought his attention to the Rockwall Studios complex, which contains 100 spaces for artists. Following a vocal collaboration with Car Bomb on "Third Revelation" in 2012, Duplantier decided to undertake his production activities (apart from Gojira) in 2016 for their album, Meta. He mainly produces American bands at Silver Cord Studio.

In September 2018, Nick John, the Gojira, Mastodon, and Slayer manager, died from cancer. Mastodon performed a rendition of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven at his funeral while Duplantier recorded it on his cell phone.

Artistry Influences Duplantier's early influences include bands such as Death, Metallica, and Slayer. He said that the ambition of Gojira in their early days was to be "violent and dissonant and weird". As he grew older, Duplantier mentioned other musical styles as influences, such as progressive rock, traditional rock, Americana, and blues. In 2021, he has also discussed how Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix are continuing inspirations to him. He has also been surrounded by non-musical influences, such as noise, landscape, and emotion. Duplantier has a wide range of musical tastes. He has an interest in the music of Massive Attack, "old jazz", Dead Can Dance, classical music, traditional music, and Stephan Micus.

Voice Duplantier has been known for his aggressive vocals and own signature style, going from a typical death growl to an emphasis on clean singing in Gojira's latest works. He experimented with his voice on The Way of All Flesh, and then he continued the clean vocals with the low note on L'Enfant Sauvages "Born in Winter". In 2016, Duplantier said he redefined his vocal style with an even greater emphasis on singing. He has expanded his vocal range by personal choice, citing a "vital" need to sing to develop vocal versatility and style diversity. On Fortitude, music writer Chad Bowar regarded his vocal performances as a combination of all of his previous techniques: "harsh and melodic". His throat singing was incorporated with various musical forms punctuating "Amazonia", such as the woodwind instrument and the Jaw harp. For their review of this album, Forbes stated that Duplantier's "vocals and lyrical writing remain at the top of his game, and they further cement him as one of the most unique sounding aggressive vocalists of all time."

Lyrical themes

In 2016, Duplantier gave a broad interpretation of the lyrical theme of Gojira's songs, saying, "My lyrics speak above all about the liberation of the soul, encourage to see the beauty of things." According to Duplantier, the title of Gojira's second album, The Link, was a symbolic "link" between earth and sky, in allusion to an individual spiritual journey toward self-knowledge. The roots of the tree symbolised the unconscious, while the branches symbolised the divine; thus, the link represented the trunk. Thematically, Gojira's third album recounted the transition from a situation of conflict and war to a situation of serenity that he hoped to see accomplished within humanity, hence the album's title, From Mars to Sirius. Duplantier paid homage to the intelligence of whales on the album and was also inspired by an idea of extraterrestrial life on the "ocean planet" Sirius C. While he theorized that whales would inhabit Sirius C, Speaking on his own behalf and on behalf of Gojira, Duplantier said, nonetheless, that they "do not go on a crusade" and are not imposing their ideas on other bands while on tour. According to him, music has remained the most important; saying, "It is raw and in your face." The Lyon-based radio station Radio Metal asked him what he would do for a living if he were not in Gojira, or even if he had not made music at all; he responded, "I would be an activist in Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd, an action that defends the planet or the animals. Without any hesitation." He said of himself and Gojira that they spontaneously headed toward Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd and began supporting the organization because, according to him, they became "hard heads" similarly to the band due to the same nomadic lifestyle; adding that they "give everything for their passion, to defend the earth". Duplantier observed that the planet has been overpopulated and thus argued about his lifestyle in accordance with his convictions, saying: "I try to reduce my impact", adding, "but that seems like just a drop in the ocean". In April 2021, in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, he mentioned his intention to launch the band's own foundation to develop its activist branch.

He has said being sensitive to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, and after reflection and speech, he decided to undertake actions to accomplish positive results. During the COVID-19 pandemic, using Zoom call, Duplantier decided to initiate a dialogue with the Indigenous leader Sonia Guajajara of the Articulation of Indigenous People of Brazil, an Indigenously-owned organization fighting for their rights. The charity auction raised more than $300,000 through donations from Metallica, Tool, Devin Townsend, Slash, Slayer, among others.

For several days in late August 2021, Duplantier participated in demonstrations supporting the Indigenous cause at one of Brazil's largest Indigenous rallies. Duplantier posted a video on Instagram, raising awareness about the arrest, asking his audience to join him in a "peaceful protest to demand the release of Paul Watson", in front of the parliament in Copenhagen. Gojira later posted the same video on their official Instagram account.

Personal life Family In 2010, while Gojira was on tour supporting Metallica in Lithuania, Duplantier met his future wife twice in the same day during a "day off"; then Lars Ulrich invited them to drink wine together at the end of the night.

Political views In 2008, Duplantier made a pro-US discourse, stating that the influence of the United States has "a lot of weight in the world, in the world's economy", benefiting from being "a very culturally wealthy country", and has succeeded in "facing the future instead of being in the past".

Equipment

When playing with Gojira in 2009, Duplantier's equipment was listed as the following: Charvel Joe Duplantier Signature San Dimas Style 2 Charvel Joe Duplantier Signature Pro Mod San Dimas Style 2 Jackson SLS Guitar EVH 5150 III amplifier head EVH 5150 III 4x12 Cab Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner pedal Noise Suppressor pedal Dunlop .88 millimeter tortex picks DiMarzio ClipLock black strap

Discography Gojira

Demos Victim (as Godzilla) (1996) Possessed (as Godzilla) (1997) Saturate (as Godzilla) (1999) Wisdom Comes (as Godzilla) (2000)

EPs Maciste All'Inferno (Gojira) (2003) End of Time (Gojira) (2012)

Studio albums Terra Incognita (2001) The Link (2003) From Mars to Sirius (2005) The Way of All Flesh (2008) L'Enfant Sauvage (2012) Magma (2016) Fortitude (2021)

Empalot Brout (demo, 1999) Tous aux Cèpes (full-length, 2002) Empalot en Concert (live, 2004)

Cavalera Conspiracy "Sanctuary" (single, 2008) Inflikted (full-length, 2008)

As a guest or session musician Eros & Thanatos by Manimal (on "Dead Meat") (full-length, 2004) Through the Absurd by Trepalium (on "Savage") (full-length, 2004) Contraires by MyPollux (on "Coffre à Souhaits") (full-length, 2006) Demi-Deuil by Aygghon (on "La Terre Dolente") (full-length, 2006) All Seeing Eyes by Klone (on "All Seeing Eyes") (full-length, 2008) For Death, Glory and the End of the World by Kruger (on "Muscle") (full-length, 2009) 7th Symphony by Apocalyptica (on "Bring Them to Light") (full-length, 2010) Deconstruction by Devin Townsend Project (on "Sumeria", alongside Paul Masvidal of Cynic) (full-length, 2011) w^w^^w^w by Car Bomb (on "Third Revelation") (full-length, 2012) Damballa's Voodoo Doll by Trepalium (on "Damballa's Voodoo Doll"), alongside Matthieu Metzger of Klone (full-length, 2015) Meta by Car Bomb (on "The Oppressor") (full-length, 2016) MCID by Highly Suspect (on "SOS") (full-length, 2019) Heavy Steps by Comeback Kid (on "Crossed") (full-length, 2022) In the Shadow of Your Shadow by Cult of Luna (on "Sadness Will Reign") (full-length, 2026)

As a producer Meta by Car Bomb (full-length, 2016) Badder Than Brooklyn by Decatur (full-length, 2017) The Legacy of Shi by Rise of the Northstar (full-length, 2018) NYNX by McLoud (full-length, 2019) "SOS" by Highly Suspect (song, 2019) "Mother's Tongue" by Bastardane (song, 2026)