GOROD are a five-piece French Technical Death Metal band, originally formed in Bordeaux, France in 1997 under the name Gorgasm. In 2005, the band officially changed their name to GOROD, and released their first full-length album under their new name titled Neurotripsicks through Willowtip Records in 2006. The lineup back then featured a different vocalist by the name of Guillaume Martinot.
Fast forward to 2010, Julien ‘Nutz’ Deyres entered the band, taking on the responsibilities of the vocals. The first official album that Julien recorded on is titled, A Perfect Absolution, which released in 2012 through Listenable Records. The lineup of GOROD today features two of their original members, Matthieu Pascal on guitar and Benoit Claus on bass, along with guitarist Nicolas Alberny, who joined the band in 2010, and drummer Karol Diers, who joined in 2014.
Outside of GOROD, Julien is also involved in a few other projects, Ahasver, The Prisoner, Wonderbar, and a Grind cover band called, Grist. He also is a vocal coach who says you have to feel completely relieved, and Peaceful inside if you want to bring out the craziest growl from within, “You really have to feel like you are tasting a margarita cocktail, you are in the islands and chilling, and then you are able really to scream. This is exactly the same way to act with singing, clean singing or screaming. Then you can also start acting a bit because everything is also about acting. If you feel tension in your muscles and everything, that’s not good even for clean singing, or growling, or yelling. You have to be in the same moods, like the same state of body control in that way.”
Julien is also a tour guide in France and an Art Historian who’s created a master thesis about Art History, which is why he treats working on songs as if he’s writing a thesis. However, not all lyrics he enjoys writing until they’re finished, “At the moment when I have to get into it and when I have to make it, this is just pure pain. I have no fun at all in writing, but when it’s over, I’m super proud of it.”
The band always has fun playing the Music they do and enjoys doing stuff they’ve never done before. They have no obligation to obey or follow any standards. All of the composition of GOROD comes from the like-minded individuals within the band, especially with their guitarist, Matthieu, who’s made the overall Music since the beginning. Matthieu is a very open-minded Musician according to Julien, as he listens to Funk, Jazz, and basically everything but Metal, and puts a lot of different influences into the Music, some of which can be funny, or have hidden jokes within the Music, “I think this is also what I’m trying to catch, to make a coherence between the topic of the lyrics and also the way he’s making Music. It’s always a communication between that. When it’s brutal, it has to be brutal.”
On March 7th of 2023, GOROD independently released their seventh full-length album, technically their eighth, counting from the Gorgasm days. This is the fourth album featuring Julien on vocals. David Thiers produced, mixed, and mastered the album at Secret Place Studio in Bordeaux, France. It is the follow up album to their 2018 release, Aethra, an album based on inspiration from a painting Julien saw at a museum called, “Mahana no atua” or “Day of the Gods” of the Polynesian Goddess, Hina, painted by Paul Gauguin.
For The Orb, the writing had to be more trivial and much more direct than what Julien normally writes, and rather than being inspired by a piece of Art, the piece of Art came afterwards, “Usually, I’m working with Spirituality, interpretation of Spiritualities everywhere in the world, and iconography, because I’m a specialist of iconography in Art History. Everything is about riddles that are hidden, senses and all that. And with philosophy, even if the notions are pretty complicated, you have to understand it because it’s about a dialogue, it’s about transmitting information, and it’s about exchange and I wanted to really to get back on it.”
Breeding Silence, which is the second single from The Orb, contains a famous quote within the chorus, “Listen to the forest that grows, rather than the tree that falls,” which comes from German Philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the song, it is written as a literal translation, “I like this one because this fits pretty much with the overall topic. Because this song was written in specific context, I started to write the lyrics right at the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine. I had a discussion in the beginning of the conflict with a good friend of mine who was also a great listener of our Music and we were chatting. There are some sentences that come from that discussion on this song, so it’s meaningful.”
The song is also about the problems we hear about when it comes to borders and territories, and how people can become intolerant with one another based on their different ethnicities, “they say that when it’s times of war, when we have a common enemy, then we become friends again. This song is also talking about that, listen to the overall things, not about the little problem that you see directly here.”
Julien realized when he was finishing up Aethra, that there wasn’t really a punch line. And so, he wanted to create a punch line for The Orb, “I was thinking about a sentence that can fit that can be a philosophical sentence or something that is straightforward with full of sense, but just the sentence on its own. Breeding Silence, these are one hundred percent punch lines, in the end this is only what remains, and also on Waltz of Shade, there are many punch lines in it.”
“When I say punch line, I am more following the philosophical aspect. So as a philosopher, because I always Loved the philosopher’s punch line when I was a kid, and I was always mentioning some of them, like for instance the Hegel one, “Listen to the forest that grows, rather than the tree that falls” in there are like this one, but I wanted to create my own. So, this is what I did on it, and on every song on this new album, there are punch lines, and afterwards I’m adding Art references.”
More songs on the album that have a lot of punch lines are the eighth track, Scale of Sorrows, and the sixth track and very first single from The Orb, Victory. In the Summer of 2021, Julien went on a road trip throughout Europe, ending up in the Netherlands at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. On the video for Victory on YouTube, the cover photo is from the Jan Toorop ‘O Grave, where is thy Victory?’ painting that Julien saw while visiting the museum, “the name of this picture is actually the quote from the Bible that is used on the beat, on the breakdown of that song. It’s a quote from Corinthians. This is the name of that picture. You can see there is an open grave and there is the Death that is going to seek for the dead body and to torment it. This is Death, this is the Life. Who won? So, this is something very epic. This is a combination between a work of Art, a proper painting which I really Love, which I saw for real when I was in Amsterdam.”
GOROD also released their newest Music video for the second track off of The Orb, titled, We Are The Sun Gods, which you can check out below. The concept for the album is about the Sun, and their previous album released in 2018 titled, Aethra, is inspired by the Moon, and was more dream-like and focused on the interpretation of that star. We Are The Sun Gods is a depiction of the thought of spending our entire existence as Human beings as making the Sun our God, but also the thought of maybe the Sun made us, and is super fan of what we are, and we are the Sun’s idols.
“On this star we can take time to contemplate and create a myth anywhere we are in the world. And this is a universal symbol. As the Moon is a universal symbol, the Sun is also a very important one because this is a source of Life, but time to time it can be dangerous as well. The Moon, this is the moment of the night, of the ghosts, of something we don’t see. And for some other people, when the Sun is heating too much, the Sun is an enemy because it’s burning all the harvest, it’s drying everything up, and the Moon is the moment where the night is refreshing. It looks like a guide, so we have to follow the Moon to go somewhere.”
“During the night, your senses are a bit blurred and when your senses are blurred, your imaginations run more. When it’s during the day, when the Sun is lighting up everything, your senses are less blurred, so everything is a bit more trivial or realistic because you can see with your eyes, and your eyes are reflection of the greatest reality that comes to us. But when I say it comes about the Sun, in every kind of tribe, of Spiritualities, the Sun is always one of the major things. This is always at the very top of the pantheon of any Gods.”
The closing track of The Orb is actually more of a surprise, bonus-like track, as it is a cover of the song Strange Days, originally by The Doors. GOROD is into provocation and making combinations that aren’t necessarily supposed to fit together, while creating weird ingredients to make a recipe to see if it works, like the purpose of doing Strange Days. “Time to time, it is good to release the beast and do whatever you want to do, even if it can sound like a transgression following not any laws that that’s supposed to be. Our drummer, Karol, is a superfan of The Doors. As we are friends, I mentioned it before. We party a lot together, and almost every party, Doors are playing”
The song was so much fun to make for the band and also one of the easiest songs to record on the entire album as it wasn’t really about singing, more about interpretation. They clearly re-listened to every part of the original song, and how it was recorded, and following the notes of how Jim Morrison sang it. “I had really a lot of fun to do it and we were like, ‘okay, it’s gonna be the last song.’ It can be taken as a bonus track, but that’s part of the album, and that’s also a good reflection of what we are, because in almost the whole GOROD discography, there are some little covers or some quotes, or some parts, or some tracks who are taken from other Artists. “
Article by Jenna Williams ‘The Scream Queen’
