YMMV / Gojira (Band)

• Awesome Music: Lots of it, but From Mars to Sirius and Magma generally seem to be the band's most highly regarded albums, especially with the latter being nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2016.
• Broken Base:
  • While the album was well-received overall, the generally softer and simpler sound of Magma didn't make all the fans happy. Cue obligatory accusations of "selling out" from fans of their more extreme era.
  • Fortitude elicits similar reactions, some liking the return to a heavier sound similar to L'Enfant Sauvage while keeping some of the sonic evolutions of Magma, while others see the album as an inferior retread of that older sound with an overly polished production.
• Crazy Is Cool: Jean-Michel Labadie may be the bassist, but his live performances are anything but subdued. Expect lots of headbanging and throwing his bass around.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Meshuggah. Although it has been often regarded as the "Metallica vs. Megadeth" of extreme Avant-Garde Metal, the bands' fanbases have both shades of rivalry and friendship.
• Growing the Beard: From Mars to Sirius marks the point at which the band found their identity following the deathy Early-Installment Weirdness of Terra Incognita and their usual sound appearing as a rough sketch on The Link.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • L'Enfant Sauvage is often jokingly referred to in the death metal fandom as "elephant sausage". This is due to a number of people misreading the album title upon its release.
  • Joe and Christian's penchant for "pick scraping" has not gone unnoticed and is often joked about by fans. For reference, this video contains every pick scrape they've ever included in a song, with "From the Sky" clocking in with the highest amount at 33.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "1990 Quadrillions de Tonnes" from Terra Incognita is a 3 and a half minute track consisting of an instrumental section with various screams over it. It is very surreal and unsettling in nature.
  • "Amazonia" from Fortitude is all about the increasingly devastating fires in the Amazon rainforest, and sounds appropriately bleak and menacing.
  • The video for "Another World" shows the band members, in an animated style, attempting to build a spacecraft in order to reach a titular new world, where they may escape our current polluted and dying Earth. They only manage to arrive at Earth itself presumably many years into the future, realizing where they are when they come across a half buried and overgrown Eiffel Tower. The band finds themselves in what Earth could become if its crises, like the changing climate, aren't properly dealt with.
• The Pete Best: Alexandre Cornillon, the bassist who only contributed to the original Godzilla material.
• Sequel Displacement: Their first two albums, Terra Incognita and The Link, are their least popular records overall, with "Love" and "Clone" from the former being the only songs that generally get significant recognition. Their Roadrunner Records albums (L'Enfant Sauvage, Magma and Fortitude) are the most successful and popular so far, though From Mars to Sirius and The Way of All Flesh are also well-known.
• Signature Song: "Explosia," "Flying Whales" and/or "Backbone".
  • A case can be made for "Vacuity" as well.
  • More recently, "Silvera" could qualify as one.

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