L’Enfant sauvage by Gojira

L'Enfant sauvage, the fifth Gojira album and the French band's first on a major, hit the racks on 26 June 2012 through Roadrunner, which had signed them the year before. The songs were written and worked up at Le Studio des Milans in southwest France, then recorded in New York, with Joe Duplantier co-producing alongside Josh Wilbur. The lineup is the one they've kept since becoming Gojira in 2001: Joe on vocals and guitar, brother Mario Duplantier on drums, Christian Andreu on guitar and Jean-Michel Labadie on bass.

The title means "the wild child" and borrows its idea from François Truffaut's film about Victor of Aveyron, a boy discovered in the forest living more like an animal than a person. The band went after power, density and epic scale: groove metal riffs that lock and lurch, technical death metal precision grinding underneath, and Mario pummeling the kit like it owes him money. It reached 34 on the Billboard 200, went gold in France and cleared the runway for Magma.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.