Joseph Andrew Duplantier (born 19 October 1976) is a French and American musician, best known as the vocalist, guitarist, and lyricist of heavy metal band Gojira. He is also a record producer and environmental activist.
Duplantier was born in Paris and grew up in Ondres. He was raised in an environment where music and the arts held a prominent place. He learned to play the guitar at fourteen and formed his first band in high school. He studied art and began working as a graphic designer before co-founding the death metal band Godzilla with his younger brother Mario in 1996. He was also a founding member, along with his brother, of the band Empalot. Godzilla changed its name to Gojira, which rose from obscurity to international prominence. He is also the former bassist of Cavalera Conspiracy, to which Gloria and Max Cavalera invited him.
Duplantier holds US citizenship by birthright, which led him to settle in New York City in 2011. He owns a recording studio called Silver Cord Studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Throughout his career, he affirmed his concern for nature and animals. He is engaged in thinking about ecological problems and environmental protection, reflected in his lyrics. Duplantier also expressed his support for indigenous peoples in Brazil through fundraising efforts.
Early life Duplantier was born on 19 October 1976 in Paris. His mother, Patricia (née Rosa; 6 October 1950 – 5 July 2015), was American. She was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in Los Angeles. His father, Dominique Duplantier, born in 1945 in Bordeaux, is a French painter and architectural drafter, a former student in history at the Faculté des Lettres (Faculty of Letters) and engraving at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Due to this, Duplantier (and his brother) holds dual French and US citizenship. He is franco-américain (French-American).
In 1977, the family left Paris and moved to Ondres, a small seaside town in the Landes department, in an old house with no heating system dating from the Louis XV period. He was raised there, in southwest France, near the Basque country, at north of Biarritz. His sister, Gabrielle, was born in 1978 in Bayonne, and his brother, Mario, was born in 1981. His mother, manifesting a marked interest in art activities, was a yoga and dance teacher in the periphery of Bayonne. The work of precision and patience of his father, who got up every day at 4:30 am to work, had a significant influence on him. His mother described him as "always active, very creative. Sensitive, gentle", with "some secret force within him, some unusual maturity". As a child, the awakening of his ecological conscience had begun after walking on oil traces on the beach.
When Duplantier was thirteen, he discovered New York City for the first time, accompanied by his cousin during a visit to his family in Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg. Greeted at the airport by his maternal uncle, it was then that he realized how attracted he was to the city. He grew up in an environment where his parents listened to blues, fado, pop, Mozart, Chopin, Piaf, L. Shankar, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Pink Floyd, the Police, Supertramp, and Joan Baez. His sister listened to world music, country music, and African percussion. According to Duplantier's recollection, he began by taking piano lessons but soon realized that he preferred the guitar. He began playing his mother's classical guitar, which only had two strings. He listened to hip hop music during a period of time while his cousin was passionate about Iron Maiden and Metallica. He experienced bullying at school.
Subsequently, a second incident marked him when his brother contracted ear infections after swimming in polluted water. With his brother, he was dismayed by the household and industrial wastes and dead animals stranded in the protected area of the dunes of Ondres. Through the influence of his cousin, he began learning to play Metallica's "Fade to Black" on the guitar when he developed his understanding on this matter. At the age of fourteen, Duplantier began listening to Metallica's Ride the Lightning to find out more about this musical genre which aroused his curiosity. He continued his interests in metal music with Master of Puppets, then Sepultura, and seeking to define his own musical identity he pursued death metal through the band Death.
In high school, at seventeen years of age, he formed his first band, called Eclipse, and embarked on jam sessions with his brother, who had a growing interest and aptitude for drumming. Duplantier went to university for two years and spent between three and four years in art school, after which he began working as a graphic designer for a short time. Dead Man Walking by Tim Robbins has been his favorite movie growing up. When he was a young man, he distinguished himself by picking up trash on a beach and scattering it in the parking lot of the mayor's office, attracting the attention of the local media in France. Duplantier said: "I found it so weird; people aren't bothered by what's on the beach, but when it's on a parking lot, it becomes a problem".
Career Gojira
Duplantier and his brother formed their band and established themselves on the live circuit in southwest France. Initially called Godzilla in 1996, the band was later renamed Gojira. He recalled building cabins in the forest as a child. Then, at the age of twenty-four, he decided to return to the forest and built a new one where he would live with his girlfriend for two years without income or electricity. Gojira's 2001 debut studio album, Terra Incognita, was written during this experience.
When launching the band, singing in French was irrelevant to Duplantier; he instead chose to sing in English in efforts to globally project the band's aspirations. Thus, he said he did not sing about the problems of France but international issues and the damage inflicted on the planet. He said, "We consider ourselves above all as human, not French." According to Duplantier, the band's primary goal was to maintain complete autonomy and "total control over the band's music". He has been responsible for the artworks for Gojira's albums, each representing an idea that he spontaneously and minimalistically designs.
Touring in support of their second album, The Link, Duplantier used to let his imagination run free when performing the songs' extended outro, developing a propensity to experience a "vision" while in a "trance"; saying, One of his first achievements was when the band reached headliner status in France and performed at the Paris' Élysée Montmartre, promoting From Mars to Sirius and then initiating their first tours overseas, notably in America. In 2008, Randy Blythe flew from the US to France to record his vocals on and was hosted at Duplantier's home in the southwest for a week. In 2012, he also occasionally played drums in live performances when he and his brother switched places.
A week before the release of Gojira's Magma, he expressed his disillusionment when he said that the metal genre did not receive the attention of the main French-language media. He described the genre as a niche perceived as culturally unimportant in the country, contrasting with Scandinavia and Germany. Benoit Guerin, department director of Ouest-France, echoed his view and wrote, "In France, [modern] chanson is the queen", noting that it took Gojira a significant impact on the metal music scene and decades-long experience "to benefit from media spotlights worthy of their rank in their own country". Throughout 2016 and 2017, the French press would publish after scrutiny that Gojira ended up being one of the largest exporters of music from France, leading the country's metal category. In 2017, Gojira performed two consecutive sold-out concerts at the Paris' Olympia, at a time when the band was at its peak of popularity. Regarding the band's first-ever Grammy nomination at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, Duplantier said: "We started out playing thrash and pretty intense death metal, tracks over which I've been screaming for 20 years, so I didn't expect any reward."
In 2021, Fortitude increased Gojira's media exposure in France and earned them global chart success through the album revolving around Duplantier's committed and positive lyrics. The band was scheduled for its first headlining arena tour in Europe and the UK in 2022, including the 20,300-capacity Accor Arena in Paris (it was postponed to 2023 due to COVID-19 restrictions).
Duplantier portrayed the band's lifestyle as "marginal", comprising musicians who are more creative than "self-destructive" and more interested in art than partying. He later stated that they were "lucky" to have met because communication is the indicator of their personality matching, and also noted that neither of them has drug addiction problems. Thus, the line-up, including Jean-Michel Labadie and Christian Andreu, has never changed. Duplantier portrays Gojira as "four brothers, united, to live our passion".
Before Gojira embarked on their 12-date arena tour in France, beginning on 27 November 2025 at Reims Arena, Duplantier announced that he had injured his hand a few weeks earlier and subsequently underwent minor surgery. Unable to play guitar, he was replaced by Car Bomb guitarist Greg Kubacki. The tour concluded on 12 December at the Zénith of Strasbourg, with a total of 100,000 tickets sold.
Empalot
Duplantier, along with his brother and friends, was also a member of a festive, theatrical fusion-genre band called Empalot, with which he toured France from 1999 to 2004.Interview with Joe Duplantier of Gojira Culture Bully 10 November 2008. Retrieved on 10 August 2009. For him, the project was synonymous with fits of laughter and happiness. Joe and Mario Duplantier founded Empalot.
Cavalera Conspiracy
In 2007, Max and Igor Cavalera initially asked Labadie, bassist of Gojira, to fill in on bass for their band, Cavalera Conspiracy. However, Labadie was busy with prior commitments, including Gojira. Instead, Duplantier became the band's bassist through the influence of Max Cavalera's wife, Gloria. Playing Sepultura's "Territory" with the Cavalera brothers during the first jam session in the presence of all the families left him indelible memories. Moreover, while working with the band on their debut album, he experienced a diametrically different studio process, as the songs composed in the morning were recorded "spontaneously" in the afternoon. The studio session lasted fifteen to twenty days. Duplantier stated that Gojira and the recording of The Way of All Flesh had been his main priority, which led him not to do extensive touring with Cavalera Conspiracy. In 2008, he was replaced by Johny Chow on bass duties for Cavalera Conspiracy. Max Cavalera regretted that Duplantier did not appear on the band's second album, Blunt Force Trauma. Cavalera said, "He is a great musician, with a lot of good ideas."
Silver Cord Studio Duplantier is the owner of Silver Cord Studio, a recording studio located in Ridgewood, Queens, New York, which he designed himself. After the experience of Gojira's recording studio in the Landes, called Le Studio des Milans, Duplantier sought to continue producing albums independently and planned to create new premises for the band in the US. A friend brought his attention to the Rockwall Studios complex, which contains 100 spaces for artists. Following the project initiation, he teamed up with a friend and sound engineer from Atlanta. With the DIY ethic, he built the studio with the help of friends and people he hired. Duplantier managed the construction project and was involved daily over a period of six months. The studio's construction began in November 2014 and was completed at the pivotal moment of the recording start of Gojira's Magma.