Gojira released «L’Enfant Sauvage» in 2012 via Roadrunner Records. The fifth album by the Frenchmen from Bayonne — known for their environmental lyrics and their intensely demanding music — is inspired by the story of a wild child found in France in 1798, after years of living isolated in the wilderness.
Country: France
Genre: Progressive Death Metal / Groove Metal
For fans of: Meshuggah, Opeth, Lamb of God
The listen
«L’Enfant Sauvage» embodies the sense of wildness: the emotional tone is desperate and fierce, like the roars of a human-animal cornered. But it’s not only wildness — Gojira also capture the deep loneliness of the isolated, the primal need for contact that is never fulfilled until it turns into pure, animal violence.
Alongside the hard core there is also intense restraint: the record doesn’t only speak of the breaking of our humanity, but also of the painful process of reclaiming it. This comes through best on «The Gift of Guilt» and «Pain is a Master», which explore difficult aspects of the human condition with turbulent, intellectual outbursts that never stop struggling.
The album opens with the tightly wound «Explosia», which hits like a combination of a locust swarm and a storm. However technically dense and aggressive Gojira’s death metal is, they never put the instrument above the feeling or the idea: every abrupt tempo and every tortured scrape in the voice is placed with precision, reminding us that the heart is a muscle.
See also
Gojira – Mario Duplantier out of the US · Shabti – Haze, Cacophony, and White Light
