Gojira - Terra Incognita [Silver/Black Marble]

Every band has a first album they later grow out of. Gojira mostly did not. Terra Incognita, released in 2001, already contains almost everything the band would spend the next twenty years refining: the pick-scrape harmonics, the whale-sized riffs, the ecological and spiritual preoccupations, the sense that the drums and guitars are arguing with each other in a language they invented.

"Clone" opens the record and remains a live staple. "Lizard Skin" and "Deliverance" are the most straightforwardly death metal things in the catalogue. "Love" is the outlier and the album's most beloved track, a slower, more melodic piece that hinted at where the band would eventually go. "In The Forest" closes the album proper at over twelve minutes, and there is a hidden instrumental buried in the silence at the end of it, which is exactly the kind of thing a band makes on a debut and never does again.

Joe Duplantier and Laurentx Etxemendi engineered and mixed at Impuls Studios, and Jean-Pierre Chalbos mastered at La Source. The production is rougher than the later records, and that roughness suits material this hungry.

This Listenable repress is a double LP on silver and black marbled vinyl, limited to 1000 copies, with three bonus live tracks recorded in Antwerp in 2006 on side four.