French metal act GOJIRA recently announced L’Enfant Sauvage as the title of their Roadrunner Records debut. The title translates to “The Wild Child”. The album, which features 11 tracks, is scheduled to land at retail on June 26th. Guitarist/vocalist Joseph Duplantier recently spoke with Niclas Müller-Hansen at Sweden’s Metalshrine about the release. An excerpt is available below:

Q: Does it become easier writing songs or does it get harder?

JD: “It is harder, but I´m way more picky. If I come up with a riff and it´s good, it´s not good enough. Ten years ago it was good enough, you know. A lot of people think that bands in general become lazy and sometimes it´s true, but in our case it´s that we work more to make a song because we have more experience and we want to raise the bar higher and higher. We´re the same people, but we try to raise the bar. We make that effort to go deeper and deeper. Somehow it´s strange because the music becomes easier to understand and there are less things to understand and it´s less technical and stuff. It´s not because we want to sell more records, it´s just we take things more easy. What we played 10 years ago is not what we wanna hear anymore and we want to create more sophisticated things and more simple at the same time. It´s a very complicated balance. With this album I´m pretty happy and still I cannot grasp what we did and that´s the beauty of it. You work so much on every detail and then ‘Wait a minute, what is this beast?.’

Q: Writing songs for an album, do you start off thinking “Well, we´re gonna make 10 songs and that´s it!”. When do you say stop and do you say stop, like “We´ve got enough.” Or do you ever run out of ideas and that´s what makes it 10 tracks or whatever?

JD: “It´s an interesting question because it was a big thing actually. We knew that we wanted to make something a little bit shorter than usual, because we think it´s too tiring and I had this idea that we need to release a record like Master Of Puppets with eight songs. If you listen to it you want to listen again. It´s a good feeling when you´ve made it to the end of the album and your brain and your emotions can´t take it. We have a tendency to add three songs after that and it´s a little too much so I was a convinced that we needed to record like nine songs. There´s an interlude which makes it 10 and then there´s one that we wanted to put on the album so bad, but we pay a lot of attention to that. It´s not like we record a lot of songs and we put them all on. It´s like cooking. You don´t put all the salt in, you just put a little bit of it. It´s not just a bunch of songs together, it´s a piece. Sometimes we can talk for three months about how this song should be number four or five and we send e-mails to each other and we do another intro to see if it works. It´s a very precise balance. The last song on the album was almost not on the album. It was just a couple of weeks before mastering and finally we went ‘Well, it goes pretty well at the end.’ There´s a lot of that stuff. A lot of discussions.”

Go to this location for the complete interview.

The tracklisting for L’Enfant Sauvage is as follows:

‘Explosia’
‘L’Enfant Sauvage’
‘The Axe’
‘Liquid Fire’
‘The Wild Healer’
‘Planned Obsolescence’
‘Mouth Of Kala’
‘The Gift Of Guilt’
‘Pain Is A Master’
‘Born In Winter’
‘The Fall’

A special collector’s package of L’Enfant Sauvage will feature two bonus tracks and a double-colored vinyl version of the record, along with an exclusive t-shirt. Pre-orders will launch shortly.

Check out making of footage in the clip below:

Source: Bravewords.com