Early career Growing up in an environment where his mother brought
rock music,
the Beatles,
Tina Turner, and
Michael Jackson into the house profoundly influenced him. At the age of twelve, At thirteen, Duplantier began practicing in earnest the
double bass drums He commented: "In the rehearsal room, I was already a real perfectionist tyrant at thirteen. I wanted everything to be perfect." his friend Alexandre Cornillon joined them soon after. Duplantier recalled, "we immediately began to play in an extremely rigorous, almost obsessive way". In 1996, Godzilla released the first
demo on cassette tape,
Victim. Despite its amateur production "but above average", the demo displayed "an art of syncopated groove"; the band would begin performing on the underground circuit. In 1998, Cornillon left the band to be replaced by the
Basque,
Jean-Michel Labadie. He then undertook a "brutal practice regime". and represented the early years of Gojira in France. The band, which included nine musicians on stage, toured between 1999 and 2004 in France. There was almost no involvement of double bass drums in music. Their debut album,
Terra Incognita, was released the same year and already contained their trademark; "ultra-heavy, rhythmically precise crunching". In 2003, Gojira released the follow-up album,
The Link, showing more versatility and an emphasis on
melody, with "a quasi-industrial aesthetic and near-
atonal brutality". At that time, Duplantier knew he had "to pass a new level" and created a double-bass drum exercise to increase speed and control. In December 2006, he embarked on his first North America tour with Gojira as one of the support bands for
Children of Bodom. Their fourth album,
The Way of All Flesh, was released in 2008. which presented them as the leading band of the French metal scene. Duplantier's approach to the drums was more
raw energy focused on this album while maintaining a "live" atmosphere. The band had toned down their complexity on
Magma.
AllMusic's John D. Buchanan stated that "the music is still incredibly heavy". In late 2016, he had made seventeen tours around the United States with Gojira. Duplantier emphasised the
groove on
Fortitude while keeping some
polyrhythm patterns, saying that the songwriting was more about band cohesion than drum performance. The drum recording method was similar to ''L'Enfant Sauvage''. In 2021, his daily routine exercise on the double bass was still practised. He also mentioned a "return of the drums to the forefront" on the eighth album with more technical and experimental drum patterns. Duplantier appeared on
NBC's
Late Night with Seth Meyers to play drums as part of his residency with
the 8G Band throughout the first week of May 2021. The majority of Gojira's songs were created from Duplantier's
drum patterns, such as "Remembrance", "The Art of Dying", "Explosia", "Liquid Fire", "Into the Storm", and the last part of "Grind", among others. Other songs were conceived during spontaneous jams between the four musicians, such as "Sphinx", "Born for One Thing", "New Found", and "Amazonia", among others. ==Style==