Gojira: Ranking All 6 Studio Albums

L’Enfant sauvage (also affectionately known as ‘Elephant Sausage’) is best described as Gojira’s most direct album. While predecessors From Mars to Sirius and The Way of All Flesh often ebbed and flowed with experimental aggression and technical lunacy and each ran past an hour in length, the band’s major-label debut on Roadrunner Records shone with a universally identifiable rage packed into more accessible song structures.

Hinting at the minimalism that would then hit a climax on follow-up Magma, L’Enfant sauvage stretched the power of the individual riff or drumbeat to its nth degree, as felt on a blistering title track, the quietly heart-breaking “Gift of Guilt” and the enveloping “Liquid Fire”. These songs also contain some of the best choruses of Gojira’s career, with melodic death metal-like hooks that a listener can easily sink their teeth into.

As the album that would introduce Gojira to a much wider, global audience, making L’Enfant sauvage a more accessible entry into their canon proved to be a stroke of genius. The disc was met with rave reviews from the very get-go and, within months, was already being considered as one of the best death metal releases of the year.