Gojira have always had a fantastic reputation with their releases. Every album is an expansion on everything they’ve done before, and they are excellent at continuing that moment with each release. With their newest single, Into the Storm, their fourth preview of their upcoming album Fortitude, they absolutely hold that momentum and propel it further on.

The song begins with a slow, ambient soundscape that launches straight into one of the grooviest, yet simple riffs for a verse. A simple one-note progression, all orchestrated through machine-gun thirty-second note bursts in a steady eight note drive. The screaming, yet melodic vocals compliment that tone wonderfully, in typical Gojira fashion. That verse leads into an anthem-esque chorus that slows the rhythm down, but heightens the energy even more than that first jump from the intro to the chorus. Just as the song keeps heightening in intensity, there are passages where the vocals aren’t as screamed, rather almost traditionally sung. It’s interesting, because the instrumentation behind it doesn’t really hold back on that metal brutality, but it creates a cool contrast between the previous section and this bridge with cleaner vocals. Stuff like that is done throughout the entire song. Gojira make sure to implement enough variation in each of the verses to really make the progression as can be, and that’s just what a song that has so little chordal movement in the verses needs. They knew exactly how to keep the composition interesting from the moment it begins to when it ends. I find with metal especially sometimes it’s easy to get lost in standards and the blueprints of what is “metal”, but Gojira have always challenged that. In fact, I’d go as far as to say they’ve created standards themselves that other bands have followed ever since. 

Into the Storm, though maybe not as completely new as a song like Raining Blood had been in the 80s, it still serves wonderfully as both an addition of Gojira’s catalog and a progression into their sound. It’s a fun, groovy track in its entire five minutes of run-time, and definitely heightened my expectations for their full release of Fortitude.

Author: Nicholas Gaudet

Music producer and writer from Dieppe, Canada.