Joe Duplantier

His father, Dominique Duplantier, born in 1945 in Bordeaux, is a French painter and architectural drafter, a former student in history at the Faculté des Lettres (Faculty of Letters) and engraving at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Due to this, Joe Duplantier (and his brother) has dual nationality of France and the United States.

He is franco-américain (French-American).

His mother, Patricia (née Rosa; 6 October 1950 – 5 July 2015), was American.

She was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in Los Angeles.

Joseph Andrew Duplantier (born 19 October 1976) is a French and American musician, best known as the rhythm guitarist, vocalist, and lyricist of heavy metal band Gojira.

He is also a record producer and environmental activist.

Duplantier was born in Paris and grew up in Ondres.

He was raised in an environment where music and arts held a prominent place.

He learned to play the guitar at fourteen and formed his first band in high school.

Duplantier was born on 19 October 1976 in Paris.

In 1977, the family left Paris and moved to Ondres, a small seaside town in the Landes department, in an old house with no heating system dating from the Louis XV period.

He was raised there, in southwest France, near the Basque country, at 20 km north of Biarritz.

His sister, Gabrielle, was born in 1978 in Bayonne, and his brother, Mario, was born in 1981.

His mother, manifesting a marked interest in art activities, was a yoga and dance teacher in the periphery of Bayonne.

The work of precision and patience of his father, who got up every day at 4:30 am to work, had a significant influence on him.

His mother described him as "always active, very creative. Sensitive, gentle", with "some secret force within him, some unusual maturity".

As a child, the awakening of his ecological conscience had begun after walking on oil traces on the beach.

When Duplantier was thirteen, he discovered New York City for the first time, accompanied by his cousin during a visit to his family in Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg.

Greeted at the airport by his maternal uncle, it was then that he realized how attracted he was to the city.

He grew up in an environment where his parents listened to blues, fado, pop, Mozart, Chopin, Piaf, L. Shankar, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Pink Floyd, the Police, Supertramp, and Joan Baez.

His sister listened to world music, country music, and African percussion.

According to Duplantier's recollection, he began by taking piano lessons but soon realized that he preferred the guitar.

He began playing his mother's classical guitar, which only had two strings.

He listened to hip hop music during a period of time while his cousin was passionate about Iron Maiden and Metallica.

He experienced bullying at school.

Subsequently, a second incident marked him when his brother contracted ear infections after swimming in polluted water.

With his brother, he was dismayed by the household and industrial wastes and dead animals stranded in the protected area of the dunes of Ondres.

Through the influence of his cousin, he began learning to play Metallica's "Fade to Black" on the guitar when he developed his understanding on this matter.

At the age of fourteen, Duplantier began listening to Metallica's Ride the Lightning to find out more about this musical genre which aroused his curiosity.

He continued his interests in metal music with Master of Puppets, then Sepultura, and seeking to define his own musical identity he pursued death metal through the band Death.

He studied art and began working as a graphic designer before co-founding the death metal band Godzilla with his younger brother Mario in 1996.

He was also a founding member, along with his brother, of the band Empalot.

Godzilla changed its name to Gojira, which rose from obscurity to international prominence.

He is also the former bassist of Cavalera Conspiracy, to which Gloria and Max Cavalera invited him.

Duplantier possesses United States nationality by parentage, which led him to settle in New York City in 2011.

He owns a recording studio called Silver Cord Studio in Ridgewood, Queens.

Throughout his career, he affirmed his concern for nature and animals.

He is engaged in thinking about ecological problems and environmental protection, reflected in his lyrics.

Duplantier also expressed his support for indigenous peoples in Brazil through fundraising efforts.