Gojira: L'Enfant Sauvage (2LP, forest green vinyl) [ROADRUNNER]

Why you'll love it

This forest green 2LP set spreads the album over four sides at 45 RPM in a gatefold jacket. L'Enfant Sauvage debuted at No. 34 on the Billboard 200 and scored 86 on Metacritic, and The Guardian gave it a perfect rating.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Forest green vinyl
• Cut at 45 RPM
• Gatefold jacket
• Lyric inner sleeves
• Pressed in the Czech Republic

About the album

The title comes from a François Truffaut film about Victor of Aveyron, a boy found living alone in the French woods, and Joe Duplantier took the idea somewhere much bigger: a record about freedom, responsibility and what it means to grow up wild. It was Gojira's major label debut, written in the southwest of France at Le Studio des Milans and recorded in New York, and Duplantier became a father partway through the sessions.

He co-produced it with Josh Wilbur, who also mixed and engineered, and the brief was more power, more density and more epic structures. "Explosia" opens with a blast of controlled chaos, the title track rides one of the band's great stop-start riffs, "Liquid Fire" and "The Axe" keep the pressure on, and "Born in Winter" lets a little light in before "The Fall." The Guardian's Dom Lawson singled out "The Gift of Guilt" as the peak, six minutes Duplantier wrote about guilt passed down through generations.

The BBC called it as flawless an extreme metal album as you'll hear. The band toured it worldwide with the Devin Townsend Project, and the Brixton Academy show became the live album Les Enfants Sauvages. Somewhere in there a boy raised by wolves became the most civilized thing in heavy metal, and nobody has quite worked out how.

Also at Kops: more Gojira on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Roadrunner Records, a reissue of the 2012 album.