Released: April 30, 2021
Fortitude asks a harder question than its title lets on: how does a metal band write about courage without sounding like a motivational poster?
Gojira’s answer lives in the rhythm. “Born for One Thing” enters through a tumbling drum figure before the guitars clamp down on clipped low notes, pick scrapes, and carefully placed gaps. Joe Duplantier’s roar locks into that pattern while Mario Duplantier shifts the ground beneath it with double-kick bursts and sharp cymbal accents. The lyric deals with letting go of possessions, and the band makes that idea physical. Every stop demands attention. Let your mind wander, and the riff gets away from you.
“Amazonia” moves from personal discipline to shared responsibility. Jaw-harp twang, throat singing, and low woodwind calls wind through Jean-Michel Labadie’s loose, bouncing bass groove. The guitars answer with short, dry bursts while the drums keep the song circling. Its words address the destruction of the Amazon and the danger faced by Indigenous communities. The older acoustic sounds grind against distorted guitars, putting two worlds inside the same arrangement. “Another World” approaches environmental dread through a repeating hammer-on figure, then opens into a chorus where Joe stretches his clean voice across wider chords. Escape sounds tempting, even as the song knows there is nowhere else to go.
The risk of empty encouragement becomes clearest on “Into the Storm.” Joe’s call to rise could look thin on paper, so the guitars complicate it with a frantic pattern whose accents keep slipping across the beat. The chorus lands only after the verse has made your footing uncertain. “Hold On” works from the opposite direction. A rough stack of clean voices starts the song, then an off-centre guitar figure pulls the band underneath them. Joe moves between singing and a coarse bark, while the arrangement keeps breaking apart its own uplift.
The title piece provides the album’s hinge. Two minutes of hand percussion, drone, and layered voices pass a wordless melody directly into “The Chant.” The band settles into a slow sway, Mario leaves air between the tom strikes, and a bluesy guitar solo stretches across the middle. Gojira strip away much of their technical detail and allow repetition to take control. The melody is simple enough for a roomful of people to return, turning the song’s message of unity into an actual group action.
There is still doubt in the music. “The Trails” allows Joe’s quieter voice room over clean guitar, while “Sphinx” brings back his low growl and a riff that bends downward between blunt chugs. “New Found” moves from a broad vocal refrain into a long breakdown built from low guitar strikes, pick scrapes, and pinched harmonics. Mario changes his accents around that repeated figure, altering how the same few notes land each time. The mix preserves those details. Labadie’s bass keeps its rough edge, the kick remains clear, and the guitars stay wide without swallowing the voices.
“Grind” makes the final point through the album’s sharpest turn. Serrated pick scrapes, blast beats, and barked vocals control its first half. Then the machinery falls away, leaving clean chords and soft vocal layers circling to the end.
So how does Gojira write about courage without sounding hollow? They make it a group exercise with resistance built into the music. The jaw-harp pulse in “Amazonia,” the choir breathing through “The Chant,” Mario’s shifting accents, and the exhausted calm at the end of “Grind” all ask the listener to remain involved. Fortitude treats strength as the work of holding a rhythm together while the problems inside the songs remain unresolved.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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