Gojira brought heavy metal to a massive new audience with an explosive live performance at the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Paris, France.
The French metal heroes performed a fierce version of French revolutionary song Ah! Ça Ira. Watch footage of the performance below.
The band played alongside opera singer Marina Viotti on the walls of The Conciergerie – a former royal palace and prison which is now a French national monument and museum.
Gojira's performance was part of a segment called Liberté. It is the first time the Olympics opening ceremony has been held outside the Olympic stadium, with athletes travelling down the River Seine in a convoy of boats.
Before the ceremony, Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier told the New York Times that asking a heavy metal band to play a revolutionary anthem made perfect sense.
He said: “It was a very bloody era of French history, so it was very metal." He added that the band felt pressure to represent “the whole metal community on the world stage. The song’s going to be in your face."
The ceremony featured a mix of international stars and French artists across a wide range of genres, including performances by Lady Gaga and Céline Dion.
Gojira's most recent album Fortitude was released in 2021. In a glowing 9/10 review for Metal Hammer, Alec Chillingworth wrote of the record: "Fortitude is everything you wanted from Gojira and more: a breathtaking showcase of heaviness and dedication to the craft, teasing out tones, passages and emotional resonance other bands just can’t access. It’s metal for the masses, and Gojira’s crowning achievement."
Gojira playing the opening ceremony goes so fucking hard, man. Huge win for heavy musicpic.twitter.com/IfrHLHzef6July 26, 2024
This part of #OpeningCeremony with French band Gojira was badass 🤘pic.twitter.com/v6dWDorPM0July 26, 2024
