Bloodstock Festival Countdown : 30 Bands Not To Miss

3. Gojira - Ronnie James Dio Stage, Sunday Headliner

I am going to get personal here. It was on these very fields of Bloodstock that I first discovered and heard Gojira. It was back in 2010 and my second visit to Catton Hall. Sunday was awash with riches, including the gruesome delights of GWAR and the death metal supergroup that is Bloodbath. I was devouring it all and becoming one with the metal. In the middle of it all was a French band I was unacquainted with. Gojira. I stood and watched and was astounded. They sounded like nothing else. They were playing metal, so far so good, but the way they presented it was light years away from what anybody else was doing.

The key difference was the use of space and silence. Metal usually likes to pack everything it can into a 4 to 5-minute song structure. It prefers a claustrophobic sound that, whilst building intensity, can stifle the competing musical entities. Gojira strips away anything unnecessary. The songs are sparse and minimalistic. They dispense with anything unnecessary and just leave the core riffs and beats. The result is frankly astonishing and I was blown away by this complete reinvention of the music I love.

15 years on Gojira have continued to innovate. “Magma” is one of the greatest metal albums ever released because it tries to think beyond the confines of metal and conjures up a sound that is heavy and penetrating but lives beyond our music's stifling surroundings. They also went distinctly overground and mainstream by storming the Bastille (literally) of the Paris Olympics and were exposed to billions. They return to Bloodstock with rumours swirling of a new album. Whether we get any new songs is debatable, but what isn’t debatable is the fact that there is no band like them. They are now part of the musical furniture, but I am convinced there will be those who are about to go through the same conversion experienced that I had 15 years ago. I envy them as their lives are about to become so much better.