One of the leading lights in original, progressive 21st century metal, GOJIRA are about to release their sixth studio album, “Magma”, and the independent.co.uk have made it available to stream two days before official release. “Magma” sees the band taking a departure from their technical death metal roots and exploring groove, melody and atmospherics in ways that they’ve not delved into before. Even a band as accomplished and pioneering as Gojira would become stale if they were to remain churning out albums of vast, complex technical wizardry forever.
The album has already garnered favourable comparison to Metallica’s world-conquering self-titled record, known to most fans simply as “The Black Album”. Whilst “Magma” is sonically a very different beast to that 16million-selling behemoth, they share a more direct and focused approach to song-writing, with both albums coming off the back of extraordinarily technical and complex records (for Gojira, 2012’s “L’Enfant Sauvage”, for Metallica 1988’s “And Justice For All”). “Well it’s never a bad thing to be compared with Metallica,” says Joe. “It’s true that we’ve said a few times to ourselves that this is our Black Album, we’re huge Metallica fans and they really hit the radio big time with that record. We’re not quite there yet and I’m not sure we’re going there either but we definitely wanted to have songs that are easier to grasp for our poor little brains. We wanted to write a shorter album because we felt that the music was going to be epic no matter what.”
