Twenty years after forming in their hometown of Bayonne in France, Gojira’s slow but steady rise shows no signs of fizzling out. Magma strikes another ferocious blow for originality and intelligence in heavy music, as its creators embrace a greater sense of sonic space than ever, not least on the thunderous undulations of opening sprawl The Shooting Star. There are succinct, groove-driven anthems here too – the surging Silvera, the angular, fidgeting Stranded – but Gojira continue to sound unique; as mesmerising on the pummelling, tribal polyrhythms of The Cell and Pray as they are on the hulking, cosmos-hugging grandeur of the title track. Wide-eyed and hopeful where 2013’s L’Enfant Sauvage was claustrophobic and gritty, Magma is the kind of album that metalheads would love non-believers to check out, if only because it confounds all the usual stereotypes about the genre being unimaginative and dumb.
