The history of heavy metal is strewn with stories about lost releases. Whether it’s Deftones’ fabled Eros, derailed by a car accident that put late bassist Chi Cheng into a coma, or the Look Outside Your Window project that Slipknot have been banging on about for seven years now, it feels like more artists than not have publicly scrapped material over the years. Even a band as notoriously efficient and tight-lipped as Gojira are no exception.
In the spring of 2010, the French enviro-metal warriors announced that they were due to enter the studio for an EP called Sea Shepherd. Named after the anti-whaling charity, it would raise funds for the organisation and feature an array of extreme stars, including members of In Flames, Soulfly, Meshuggah and Lamb Of God. One song from the project saw the light of day in 2011, but since then it’s been the subject of speculation and a couple curious interviews. With it now having been kept at bay for more than 15 years, let’s explore… what the hell went wrong?!
Talk about the Sea Shepherd EP kicked off in April 2010, when a French news programme visited Gojira at their then-studio in Bayonne. “We’ll record and produce five songs that we will sell on our website, without going through traditional ways,” singer/guitarist Joe Duplantier said during the report. “The benefits of the sales will be donated to Sea Shepherd. There will be guests from the international metal scene.”
News on the outing stalled for the next few months, as Gojira turned their focus to touring Europe and playing festivals through the summer of 2010, promoting then-latest album The Way Of All Flesh. The next update came in October, and things still looked promising: The PRP reported that the band will hunker down in a studio in Los Angeles “next week”, with former Machine Head guitarist Logan Mader producing.
In May 2011, the first fruit of the star-studded labour came out. Of Blood And Salt offered a briny taste of the EP, and with gusto it delivered on Joe’s promise of bringing guests onboard. Prog polymath Devin Townsend handled lead vocals on the groove metal bruiser, with a guitar solo being lent by Fredrik Thordendal of djent luminaries Meshuggah. It was bloomin’ brilliant.
The rest could not come soon enough… but then it didn’t. Although Gojira re-teamed with Devin and Fredrik to air Of Blood And Salt live at the Soundwave festival in Australia in March 2012, as far as further tracks, things were dead in the water. Three months later, they put out L’Enfant Sauvage, their first album via mainstream metal label Roadrunner, and the band’s climb to arena-level acclaim properly kicked off – seemingly at the expense of what they’d been cooking up before.
In July 2017, drummer Mario Duplantier gave a revelatory interview about what went down with Sea Shepherd. Talking on Austrian TV programme Mulatschag, he claimed that technical issues sank the rest of the songs.
“We started working on the EP but the hard drive crashed so we couldn’t end the project,” he explained, “but we’re still working on it. The goal was just to talk about them [the Sea Shepherd organisation]. They work, they fight for something very important. We respect them so much, so that was a goal.”
Despite that commitment, Sea Shepherd remained unreleased, with Gojira appearing to instead focus on intense touring and more full-length albums as their stock continued to rise. 2021’s Fortitude affirmed them as world-famous aggressors, then there was the whole business of playing the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games in Paris and being seen in hundreds of millions of living rooms.
That said, Joe claimed as recently as 2023 that Sea Shepherd hasn’t been totally abandoned, and that he still has every intention of getting all of its songs out somehow.
He admitted to Kerrang!: “The one track that we did bring out, Of Blood And Salt, was great, but then it got buried – at first under technical issues, then under all of the other things we have going on. Some of it got lost; some of it needs rebuilding.
The frontman then disclosed that they were eyeing a release date before 2016 album Magma came out, but that record label suits scuppered the plan, not wanting old music to “interfere” with Gojira’s current momentum.
“After the album came out, it turned out that we were so busy that we barely had time to catch up with life,” Joe continued. “You have to rehearse, you have to be ready for tour, you have so many interviews and obligations.”
He then made quite the striking promise, declaring, “There are three more songs somewhere on a hard drive still to come out some day. I will release them before I die!”
At time of writing, that’s the latest news we have: the other tracks are still shut away somewhere, with Gojira being as busy as usual, touring while preparing for full-length album number eight. It might be too soon to write Sea Shepherd off as ‘lost’ in the way Eros and Limp Bizkit’s Stampede Of The Disco Elephants are, but at the same time we don’t have much choice right now. Come on, Gojira: prove us wrong!