French progressive metallers GOJIRA will release their long-awaited new album, “Fortitude”, on April 30 via Roadrunner Records. Today, the band has shared the forthcoming album’s first single, “Born For One Thing”, which is available on all streaming platforms and accompanied by a Charles De Meyer-directed official music video shot in France and Belgium. Available for pre-order today, “Fortitude” stands out as GOJIRA‘s first album in five years and the follow-up to 2016’s “Magma”.
As if shedding skin and baring armor in its place, “Born For One Thing” represents a natural evolution for the acclaimed French band: hyper-focused but unhinged, confrontational and yet compassionate. “We have to practice detaching ourselves from everything, beginning with actual things,” vocalist/guitarist Joseph Duplantier says of the song’s anti-consumerist message, which was partially inspired by the Tibetan and Thai philosophers he read in his youth back in France. “Own less possessions, and give what you don’t need away, because one day we’ll have to let everything go, and if we don’t, we’ll just become ghosts stuck between dimensions.”
Recorded and produced by Joseph Duplantier at Silver Cord Studio — GOJIRA‘s Ridgewood, Queens, headquarters — and mixed by Andy Wallace (NIRVANA, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE), “Fortitude” is a collection of songs urging humanity to imagine a new world — and then make it happen. The band initially laid the foundation for “Fortitude” last year with the surprise release of the 2020 single “Another World”. NPR hailed the track as “an apocalyptic banger,” while Stereogum declared, “GOJIRA are one of this century’s most important underground metal institutions.” Voted by fans as the #1 release on Revolver‘s “5 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021,” “Fortitude” continues GOJIRA‘s career-long tradition of harnessing their music as a vehicle for environmental activism with songs like “Amazonia” and “The Chant” not only surveying critical cases, but also catalyzing listeners to take action.
“Fortitude” track listing:
01. Born For One Thing
02. Amazonia
03. Another World
04. Hold On
05. New Found
06. Fortitude
07. The Chant
08. Sphinx
09. Into The Storm
10. The Trails
11. Grind
The artwork for “Fortitude” was created by Joseph Duplantier and can be seen below.
“Magma” earned GOJIRA its first-ever Grammy nominations for “Best Metal Performance” and “Best Rock Album.” GOJIRA‘s crushing track “Silvera” received a nomination for “Best Metal Performance”, while “Magma” was nominated for “Best Rock Album” at the awards.
Back in August 2018, Joseph Duplantier told Metal Injection that the band started to work on new music a year earlier. “Usually we write 12 songs and record 12 songs and release 12 songs,” he said. “Now it looks like we’re going to write 100 songs. It’s a different approach and it’s fun. We have new desires and a new way of doing things. I like to think it’s going to be awesome. I feel it’s going to be really exciting, for us at least. I don’t know what people are going to think.”
In the same interview, Joseph said that GOJIRA was planning to explore some new territory on the upcoming album. “I want to go back to some of the older influences that we have,” he said. “We were always not a death metal band. Before that, I was a DIRE STRAITS fan, Michael Jackson. We have that in us and some progressive stuff too. We have all these things and we need to express that somehow, mixed with our own special sauce. We’re working with stuff that sometimes is a bit surprising, even to us. Sometimes it’s, like, ‘What is this?’ I don’t know, let it sleep a little bit and go back to it. After this, we’re going to go back into the studio and see what’s going on.”
Photo credit: Gabrielle Duplantier
