Photo Credit: Taylor Bingley
Joe Duplantier of French metal outfit Gojira had a chat to Loudwireabout touring with Slayer and what they’ve got planned for their next album!
How would you describe your relationship with Slayer and 4Arm while on tour?
Its cool, we all respect each other. Its quiet and were working, were not partying a lot. Were here to work, I know it doesnt sound exciting and fancy. Its a professional atmosphere and I like that, our minds are at peace. Slayers crew is amazing, they help us so much and thats a huge difference from other tours.
Most of the time its great but [on some tours] it could happen that the crew is not happy and kind of tough and behave like ds and stuff like that. On this tour, theres nothing like that. [Slayer’s] tour manager is making our life easy every day, when theres something we should know he tells us. He works with our tour manager very closely, it feels like a big family and its awesome.
With this tour coming to an end, what are Gojiras plans for 2014?
We have a lot in our minds. Theres a lot of stuff wed like to do some stuff I cant talk about because its too early but definitely a new album. We at least want to work on a new album, thats going to be really important for us. Theres a platform now for our band to release a record without thinking about anything else because the deal with Roadrunner took a lot of energy and time. It was a big deal for us because we were without a record company, without management, without a crew, without a lot of things. All we had was a lawyer and an accountant and one tech for a couple years until 2009 or 2010.
We found great management, we signed a deal with Roadrunner, we have a crew on the road it took us a long time to settle down with people. Now we feel like, Okay, all we have to do now is release another album. This is the platform for us to do it without thinking about other things.
Do you write new music on the road?
We always wanted to write on the road and never did it. Were like, On this tour we have two months together on the road! Lets use this free time to write. I remember we toured for three months with Lamb of God in 2007 and all I did was one riff, one riff! [Laughs] It was impossible for us to write on the road. On this tour, for the first time were like, Okay lets do it this time. What do we need, we need speakers, a computer, keyboards so Mario [Duplantier] can do drums on the bus.
Theres no room on the bus, its so small and we need a guitar and a bass and interface and we got all that together. Its not easy, when you go on tour you think about the instrument and whats essential. Its a bit of work with all the cables and stuff so we created this small studio in the back lounge of the bus and we did write a lot of riffs this time. We have maybe 20-something ideas, cool riffs, atmospheres, intros, outros and all that stuff. So now we want to put all of this together and make and album.
Check out the rest of the interview at Loudwire
