Six bands from four countries will descend on The Garage this Halloween for a one-off celebration of BLACK ALTAR and their three decades in the black metal underground. The Polish veterans will deliver an exclusive UK anniversary performance in London on Saturday, October 31, 2026. Norway’s URGEHAL will appear as special guest headliner, while Merrimack, […]
Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford once opened up on the moment he met the legendary Dolly Parton, as well as the unlikely collaboration their meeting eventually spawned. The two beloved singers crossed paths at the 2022 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony, where Parton was inducted into the Hall itself and Priest were honoured with a special Musical Excellence Award.
Near the end of the night, Parton invited some of that year’s hosts and inductees, including Brandi Carlile, P!nk, Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon, Sheryl Crow, Annie Lennox, Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo, to come on stage and sing trademark hit Jolene with her. Halford was amongst the stars to take part in the amazing spectacle, meaning the Metal God got to meet a longtime idol of his.
“Somehow, instinctively, I knew we were going to meet,” Rob explained to Metal Hammer. “I always tell the story of my mother’s grandmother, who was a clairvoyant, and I still think I’ve got a little of that in me, because something went, ‘You’re going to meet Dolly Parton.’ Two or three days later, these emails come into the office, and Dolly’s reached out, asking, ‘Would you sing some lines on Jolene?’ You sit at home and go, ‘Oh my god, this is truly going to happen!’ Being a gay guy, ‘I’ve got nothing to wear!’ I know that she likes to sparkle and I like to sparkle, so what I wore on that night was apropos.”
As overawed by the encounter as Halford evidently was, it seems Parton herself was also very impressed to meet the heavy metal hero – not least because of his impressive facial hair.
“She goes, ‘I love your beard!’” Halford exclaimed, “and she starts to clean my beard! It was so surreal! I’m meeting this living legend and she’s tickling my beard and going, ‘So you’re going to sing some Jolene with me?’ I was just floating.”
The following year, Halford’s new-found friendship with Parton would level-up courtesy of an appearance on her rock ‘n’ roll album Rockstar, where the two would duet on the track Bygones. Halford recorded his vocals separately from Parton, sending her the demos to rave reviews.
“We’re on the phone to each other and she’s going, ‘Send me the files! Send me the files!’” Halford said. “So I sent her the files and she calls back and goes, ‘I love these! This is gonna be great!’ This is Dolly Parton on speakerphone! Ha ha! She’s just this beautiful beacon of life. You can tell by the way I’m speaking that this is important to me as a musician, to have had this literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with someone so great.”
“I been gettin’ up each morning with the hair of the downward dog.” That fantastic lyric belongs to “Marlboro Vinyasa,” the latest single from Willi Carlisle’s Tyler Childers-produced double album The Universal Bubba. Unlike prior single “Mason Jar At The Center Of The World,” which was the kind of a traditional reel you could squaredance to, this song is a barroom country-rocker. The press release repeatedly uses the word “smoky,” which would be appropriate even if a cigarette brand wasn’t name-checked in the title.
Gojira’s albums, ranked worst to best, span seven records and nearly thirty years — from a murky French death metal debut recorded under a different name to an Olympic opening ceremony watched by a billion people. No band in modern metal has evolved this far without losing the thread of who they are. This is the complete Gojira discography judged on influence, ambition, replay value and staying power rather than release-week hype. Fair warning: the album most musicians point to as their technical peak isn’t the one at number one.
How this ranking was built
Not release-week hype, and not nostalgia.
This blends long-term fan consensus, critical reassessment over time, musical influence and technical innovation, and plain replay value and emotional impact. Recency bias and nostalgia bias were both deliberately kept out.
There’s a reason this argument feels louder now than it did five years ago. After the 2024 Paris Olympic opening ceremony, an enormous new audience found Gojira all at once — and longtime fans reopened the question of which era actually defines them.
Both groups tend to arrive at different answers. That’s what makes this list worth having.
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7. Terra Incognita (2001)
The Vibe: Unfiltered death metal chaos with spiritual undertones.
Terra Incognita captures Gojira in their rawest and least restrained form. The band is overflowing with ideas, aggression and conviction, but still learning how to channel that intensity into a singular voice. The influence of Morbid Angel and Sepultura is obvious in both the riffing and the relentless pacing.
The production is murky and unforgiving, occasionally struggling to keep up with Mario Duplantier’s explosive drumming. That rawness gives the album authenticity, but it also limits its replay value against everything that followed.
Why It Ranks Here: Not because it’s weak, but because every subsequent album refined and elevated its ideas.
The Vibe: Tribal, hypnotic, and intentionally abrasive.
The Link is the bridge between Gojira’s death metal origins and the sound they’d eventually define. Repetition and rhythm replace speed and excess, producing an album that feels ritualistic rather than aggressive.
The dry, organic production emphasises texture and groove, giving “Remembrance” and “Indians” a physical, almost percussive weight. For some fans the repetition is meditative. For others it’s exhausting.
Why It Ranks Here: Historically essential, but uneven and less inviting than what followed.
Key Track: “Remembrance” Musician’s Note: The outro double-kick pattern remains one of Mario Duplantier’s most punishing recorded performances.
5. Fortitude (2021)
The Vibe: Stadium-scale metal built for mass audiences.
Fortitude is Gojira fully embracing accessibility. The songwriting is streamlined, the choruses are enormous, and the messaging leans toward resilience and unity rather than existential dread.
“Amazonia” and “The Chant” are built for festival crowds, while “Born For One Thing” retains enough bite to satisfy longtime fans. The trade-off is a noticeable reduction in menace.
Why It Ranks Here: It succeeds on its own terms, but plays things safer than most of the catalogue.
Key Track: “Born For One Thing” Best Moment: The groove-driven chorus of “Amazonia”
4. Magma (2016)
The Vibe: Grief, restraint, and emotional minimalism.
Written during the illness and death of the Duplantier brothers’ mother, Magma is Gojira at their most vulnerable. The band abandons sprawling epics for shorter, focused compositions soaked in atmosphere and sorrow.
Joe Duplantier’s clean vocals take centre stage, and the production is warmer and more restrained than anything earlier. “Stranded” became the breakthrough single, but the album’s real power is in its emotional weight.
Why It Ranks Here: A masterclass in restraint that divided fans who wanted brutality.
Key Track: “Stranded” Deep Cut: “Low Lands”
3. L’Enfant Sauvage (2012)
The Vibe: Precision brutality balanced with melody.
This is the album most often handed to new listeners, and for good reason. L’Enfant Sauvage balances technical aggression with emotional resonance without sacrificing intensity.
The production is razor-sharp, the riffs are massive, and the songwriting is disciplined. “Explosia” opens with catastrophic force, while “The Gift of Guilt” blends melody and devastation seamlessly.
Why It Ranks Here: It’s the bridge album — accessible without compromise.
Key Track: “L’Enfant Sauvage” Best Moment: The closing riff of “The Gift of Guilt”
2. The Way of All Flesh (2008)
The Vibe: Clinical, suffocating, and technically ruthless.
Among musicians, The Way of All Flesh is often considered Gojira’s true peak. The production is dry and unforgiving, making every drum ghost note and guitar scrape painfully audible.
Lyrically it confronts mortality head-on. “The Art of Dying” remains one of the most ambitious compositions in modern metal, building tension for minutes before detonating.
Why It Ranks Here: Possibly their most impressive album technically, but less universally resonant than their masterpiece.
Key Track: “The Art of Dying” Musician’s Note: The intro to “Oroborus” remains a coordination nightmare for guitarists.
1. From Mars to Sirius (2005)
The Vibe: A genre-defining eco-metal epic.
From Mars To Sirius isn’t just Gojira’s best album — it’s one of the most important metal releases of the 2000s. Built as a loose concept record about environmental collapse and rebirth, it merges crushing heaviness with atmosphere and emotional depth that extreme music rarely reaches.
“Flying Whales” became iconic without becoming a novelty, while “The Heaviest Matter of the Universe” and “Backbone” helped redefine what progressive metal could be.
Why It Wins: Because no other Gojira album reshaped the genre this completely.
Key Track: “Flying Whales” Defining Moment: The pick-scrape whale motif that became legendary without ever losing its impact.
If The Way of All Flesh represents Gojira’s technical summit, From Mars To Sirius represents their soul.
That’s why it still wins.
The full ranking
7. Terra Incognita (2001) 6. The Link (2003) 5. Fortitude (2021) 4. Magma (2016) 3. L’Enfant Sauvage (2012) 2. The Way of All Flesh (2008) 1. From Mars To Sirius (2005)
Gojira albums in release order
Terra Incognita — 2001 The Link — 2003 From Mars To Sirius — 2005 The Way of All Flesh — 2008 L’Enfant Sauvage — 2012 Magma — 2016 Fortitude — 2021
Where this ranking will divide people
The split on this band runs along a clean line, and it’s worth naming.
Musicians and extreme metal purists tend to put The Way of All Flesh first — it’s the one drummers and guitarists point at, and the technical argument is genuinely strong. Everyone else puts From Mars To Sirius first, because it’s the record that changed what the genre could sound like.
Magma and L’Enfant Sauvage are the real battleground, though. Depending on which era converted you, one of them is a masterpiece and the other is a compromise.
And Fortitude at five will irritate the people who came in through the Olympics, which is fair enough — it’s the most accessible thing they’ve made, and accessibility isn’t a flaw.
The context: their 2024 Paris Olympic opening ceremony performance brought an enormous new audience to a band that spent two decades in the underground.
Seven studio albums from 2001’s Terra Incognita to 2021’s Fortitude, ranked using a weighted fan-and-critic hybrid rather than release-week reaction.
Best: From Mars To Sirius (2005) — the consensus masterpiece and one of the most important metal records of the 2000s.
Worst: Terra Incognita (2001) — raw and authentic, but every album after it refined the same ideas better.
The musicians’ pick: The Way of All Flesh (2008) dominates among players and extreme metal purists. It lands second here.
The battleground: Magma and L’Enfant Sauvage remain the most divisive records in the catalogue.
The accessible one: Fortitude (2021) is Gojira’s most mainstream and most polarising era.
FAQ
What is the best Gojira album?
From Mars To Sirius, released in 2005. It tops long-term fan polls, critic retrospectives and musician-led discussions alike, thanks to its influence, ambition and staying power. Built as a loose concept record about environmental collapse and rebirth, it produced “Flying Whales” and “The Heaviest Matter of the Universe” and reshaped what progressive metal could sound like. The Way of All Flesh (2008) is the most credible challenger and is frequently named by other musicians as the band’s technical peak.
How many albums does Gojira have?
Seven studio albums: Terra Incognita (2001), The Link (2003), From Mars To Sirius (2005), The Way of All Flesh (2008), L’Enfant Sauvage (2012), Magma (2016) and Fortitude (2021).
What is Gojira’s heaviest album?
Terra Incognita is the rawest, but The Way of All Flesh is widely considered their heaviest in terms of sonic density, technicality and lyrical darkness. Its dry, unforgiving production makes every detail audible and gives the record a suffocating weight the debut’s murkier mix never achieved.
Which Gojira album has the whales?
From Mars To Sirius (2005), specifically the track “Flying Whales,” which features whale song samples and the enormous sliding guitar pick-scrapes that became one of the most recognisable sounds in modern metal.
Did Gojira play the Olympics?
Yes. In July 2024 Gojira became the first heavy metal band to perform at an Olympic opening ceremony, playing a metal arrangement of the French revolutionary song “Ah! Ça Ira” at the Conciergerie in Paris. The performance introduced the band to a global audience of hundreds of millions and cemented their place among the most significant heavy bands working today.
Seven albums, one Olympic stage, and an argument that’s been running for twenty years. Is From Mars To Sirius really untouchable, or does The Way of All Flesh take it? Settle it in the comments. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
Dust represents both an ending and the possibility of renewal on “DULKĖS,” the latest single from Lithuanian modern progressive metal band BLACK SPIKES. Its title means “dust,” and the song brings the group’s dark examination of human flaws to a deliberately cyclical conclusion. Beginning with restrained modern percussion and vocalist Agni’s near-whispered delivery, “DULKĖS” initially […]
What do you get if you cross a national treasure with a spectrum of sound that covers post-rock, doom, shoegaze, and most things in between? Obviously, it’s the Stoke-based, genre-defying Vordermann, whose second EP Feeding on Fireworks is a three-song journey through a spectrum of sound. First track “Ego Land” is the unseen musical juncture … Continue reading EP Review: Vordermann – Feeding on Fireworks
Album Review: Black Door – Shadows of a Funerary Gleam
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
If you have ears, then you are in need of black metal with which to fill them. It is what it is, I don’t make the rules. In observance of this, Black Door have essentially crafted a textbook for modern-day second wave inspired black metal. That’s not a new tome to write for sure, but it’s nonetheless possible to write it well, or write it poorly. It’s not always easy to articulate what separates a joyous modern rendition of the style from an underwhelming doppelgänger either, because it often comes down to gradations of how well different bands do very similar things. Fortunately, Black Door have not come to fuck around, and open fire with sulphurous, mephistophelean barrages of apex black metal riffs and harmonies that slam endless rounds into the bullseye between ferocity and melody. “Forged by Promethean Fire” is a masterclass of venomous animosity studded with brimstone hooks. Have you heard it all before? Absolutely, but when it’s done this well, it doesn’t dilute the thrill of it just because an outfit like French national treasure Mutiilation has a hundred songs of similar stripe. It’s epic, an aerial bombardment of raw guitars and hateful percussion that circles the killing field from on high like the descending hordes of the Tsva HaShamayim. A lethal ¾ time swing like scimitars through throats rows the song along towards the album’s conclusion with a confidence and passion that places it among the finer examples of traditional black metal that I’ve heard this year.
Each song is a tooth in a vast charcarodon maw of black metal. A back-end track like “Under the Yoke of an Older Spite” clamps down on writhing prey with one of the most malicious melodies on the album at 5.18, the song rumbling through tom hits until this final stretch when it javelins you through the eyeball with a stream of musical invective. Meanwhile, earlier blows – the title track for one – bring forth the blizzards with gushing curtains of frigid Immortal-esque chord progressions and reverb-saturated croaking like some demented cavern-dwelling frog deity. Raw but readable, a production like jaws yawning in the gloom stretches ahead, light enough for you to know full well what manner of death awaits while still that dark and obscure that imagination paints nightmares into the shadows. If not as harsh as the “Raw Black Metal” genre tag on metalarchives.com might imply, it’s still abrasive, ragged, sheathed in thorns and bone spurs. And it’s this that really seals the deal for me, this production style, taking material that seethes with reverence for unholy black metal and tomahawking it into your skull with all the might it’s arm can grant.
Even so, sometimes the album really is too close for comfort with it’s influences. Black Door would hardly be the first project to find inspiration in early Burzum, but even so parts of “Entrancement in Dusk…” do sound awfully close for to “Ea, Lord of the Depths”. It’s not as though Varg himself is averse to a bit of musical hijacking – among his many, many sins is…shall we say “homaging” a riff from Bathory’s “Necromancy” so closely that it’s a wonder he bothers to deny having pilfered it at all, but even so there are moments where Black Door’s own points of reference became a little too obvious for their own good. A few other quibbles remain. Nothing fatal, but “The Stale Humid Mist” bothers me in one of two ways that I can’t decide between. It’s slow, atmospheric, and deeply miserable. It’s also rather plodding and meandering – worse, it’s the second song on the album (discounting the brief intro) and after the barnburner that precedes it (the title track) “The Stale Humid Mist” feels as though it stalls the album’s engine a bit. If it were placed perhaps after the following track (“Entrancement in Dusk…”) then the sense of stunted momentum would be reduced, though that wouldn’t solve the issue of it being probably the weakest of the brood overall.
The above gripes – among a few others (I’m not wild about the clean vocals that crop up here and there) – shoved out of the way for a beat, Black Door otherwise mercilessly storm the ramparts and slaughter the wailing unfortunates trapped within. The wheels on its chariot remain steadfastly beyond reinvention of course, but the conviction and songwriting Black Door hold in reserve is more than enough to keep the old tropes as rewarding as ever. So it is that the black flame flares still. Before it’s beckoning fingers do the holy tremble, through it’s billowing smog do legions vomit lungfuls of steaming blood, within the crackle of it’s embers does the sum total of all knowable agony see infliction upon shrieking, writhing flesh. And for so long as bands like Black Door draw breath, it will continue to flare forever more.
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