Gojira released The Way of All Flesh in Europe on October 13, 2008, with the US release following the next day. Their fourth studio album grew out of years spent touring From Mars to Sirius, as Joe Duplantier began confronting his own mortality and the band reconsidered how to capture its music in the studio.
That confrontation became a physical ordeal in the video for “Vacuity,” directed by Julien Mokrani and Samuel Bodin. A woman carries her own casket. Duplantier told Rock Sound that the image expressed the album’s concern with facing death and pain; the song itself drew on the Buddhist idea of emptiness. Released a week before the album, the video was filmed in the Basque country where the band lived.
Gojira entered the sessions with their live performances still shaping the way they wrote. Speaking to Metalpaths in 2009, Duplantier described how three years touring From Mars to Sirius had pushed them toward music that was rougher and more direct. They wanted to preserve the intensity they had developed in front of audiences, carrying that experience into the compositions.
Getting the recording right meant accepting an outside perspective. Duplantier had worked with Logan Mader on Cavalera Conspiracy’s Inflikted and admired the result. In a June 2008 interview with Metalitalia, he recalled that Mader offered to mix Gojira’s next record after telling him he was a fan. A few phone calls settled the arrangement.
The decision answered a problem Duplantier knew from earlier albums. By the end of recording, the band’s ears were exhausted. They wanted someone who could hear details they had lost perspective on and recognize possibilities they might miss. Mader became involved while recording Mario Duplantier’s drums, giving them help from the beginning of the sessions.
Joe later told Metal Hammer that Gojira had wanted fewer layers and a more spontaneous approach. Working with Mader helped them avoid previous recording mistakes and achieve greater clarity. Experimentation remained part of the process, including altered tunings, interludes and extended introductions and endings. The nearly ten-minute “The Art of Dying” had room to unfold within an album that also contained the two-and-a-half-minute “The Silver Cord.”
The lyrics followed their own questions about what survives the body. In a 2008 Pitchfork interview, Duplantier explained that “Oroborus” concerned reincarnation and recurring lives, while “Yama’s Messengers” explored the fear of dying and karma. He also created the cover’s skeletal figure, describing it as a dying man. These ideas reflected his belief in the soul’s immortality and his difficulty accepting physical death as the end of existence.
The relationships made on tour also found a place on the record. Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe appeared on “Adoration for None,” a collaboration that began during time spent fishing and camping with Duplantier in the US. As Duplantier recalled to Metalpaths, Blythe asked when Gojira were making another album and volunteered to sing on it. “We didn’t decide anything, he did!” Duplantier said. He understood that the appearance could help Gojira reach American listeners, but described it first as something that came from their friendship.
The album took them back to North America with their name at the top of the bill. In May 2009, Gojira undertook their first headlining tour of the continent, supported by The Chariot and Car Bomb. The band that had used its years as a touring support act to shape The Way of All Flesh was taking those songs into its own headline shows.
