GOJIRA Frontman: We Made New Album Short On Purpose

Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of GuitarWorld.com recently conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Joseph Duplantier of French progressive metallers GOJIRA. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

GuitarWorld.com: You were supposed to tour as openers for LAMB OF GOD last year, but that got cancelled and you ended up doing this tour [with DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT]. Did you have to rearrange the set list when you shifted from openers to headliners?

Joseph: Yeah, when it happened, it was a pain in the ass for us. When the album came out, we needed to be on a high-profile tour and do something special. Our first thought was, "We need to headline right away," because we felt it was time for us to headline. But then LAMB OF GOD came to us with an offer that we couldn't turn down, so we postponed the headline tour to now, actually, and thought that LAMB OF GOD would be the starting point for this album cycle. And when Randy [Blythe, LAMB OF GOD singer] went to jail, of course, it was canceled and we were mostly worried for him, but it was hard to react to that. So we did a small run on the U.S. East Coast, but nothing more than that. So this is a very important tour right now because it's the first time for this album cycle we're doing the West Coast, Texas, Florida and all that.

GuitarWorld.com: "The Link", which is 48 minutes long, was your shortest album — until "L'Enfant Sauvage". Why is that? Has your songwriting became more compact over the years?

Joseph: We did this on purpose. We wanted a shorter album because our albums are most of the time very epic and draining. You cannot go through the entire album intact, you know. [laughs] So I wanted to keep it short because I have an experience as a listener of albums like METALLICA's "Master Of Puppets". It's so short, it's just eight songs. And other albums like DEATH's "Human" also has eight songs. When I listen to these albums, it's so good, so intense and short that you want to listen to it and experience it again right away. I wanted people to have the same kind of feeling with our new album. Sometimes when it's too long, you get turned off. So it helps the identity of a record to have something that is a little shorter with more impact. So this was done on purpose. We had a lot of material, and we could have done this epic, long album like we do usually, but we made it short on purpose.

GuitarWorld.com: Do you think you will continue with this same approach in the future?

Joseph: You know, it depends on the mood. Maybe the next album will be completely epic and experimental and super-long [laughs]. I really don't know, but for now I kind of like the short albums.

Read the entire interview from GuitarWorld.com.