Mario Duplantier | Gojira's deliberate hand
Mario Duplantier co-founded Gojira and played the Paris Olympics. His restraint, the Cyclone solo, and his Tama Starclassic and Zildjian rig explained.
In July 2024, a French metal band played the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, on a balcony of a Paris prison, with a decapitated Marie Antoinette. It was the strangest thing anyone has ever put in front of a global television audience, and it worked.
The drummer holding it together was Mario Duplantier, who has been in the same band with his brother since 1996 and who is, quietly, one of the most tasteful players in heavy music.
Here is the case for the least flashy great metal drummer alive.
Who is Mario Duplantier?
Mario Duplantier was born in 1981 and grew up in Ondres, in the Basque country of south-west France.
In 1996, at fifteen, he and his older brother Joe formed a band called Godzilla. By 2001 it had become Gojira, and it has had the same four members ever since — which for a metal band with this much international success is almost unheard of.
The records
Terra Incognita (2001), The Link (2003), From Mars to Sirius (2005), The Way of All Flesh (2008), L’Enfant Sauvage (2012), Magma (2016) and Fortitude (2021).
Magma and Fortitude both earned Grammy nominations, and in 2025 the band won Best Metal Performance for “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça Ira!)” — the piece they performed at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
Drumeo’s voters gave Mario both Drum Recording Of The Year and Drum Performance Of The Year in 2021, on the strength of Fortitude and his solo piece “Cyclone”.
What Mario Duplantier actually does
He plays fewer notes than anyone expects. Gojira are a heavy, technical band, and their drummer’s defining characteristic is restraint. Where another player would fill, he leaves a gap and lets the guitar breathe.
He locks to the riff, not to the beat. Gojira’s whole sound is drums and guitars moving as one rhythmic unit — the pick-scrapes, the stabs, the stops. That requires a drummer who is prepared to abandon a groove entirely for four bars.
His toms do the melodic work. “Flying Whales”, “The Heaviest Matter of the Universe”, “Silvera” — the memorable drum moments are almost all tom patterns, not fills.
He hits with weight rather than speed. The double kick is used in bursts. It is a punctuation mark, not a texture.
He is a visual artist too. Duplantier draws and paints seriously, has published art books, and the same aesthetic — spare, deliberate, high-contrast — runs through his drumming.
“Cyclone”
His solo piece, and the one that won him the 2021 performance award.
It is worth watching because it is a composition: sections, dynamics, a melodic idea that returns. There is speed in it, but the speed is not the subject. Very few metal drum solos are worth a second listen. This one is.
Mario Duplantier’s drum kit
- Drums — Tama Starclassic Bubinga. A six-piece: two 22”x18” bass drums, 12”x9” and 13”x10” rack toms and a 16”x16” floor tom, in a white pearl finish with diamond inlay and black nickel hardware.
- Snares. A 14”x6.5” as the main drum, and he uses the Tama PL565 bell brass — a heavy, extremely loud drum that cuts through the density of Gojira’s guitar sound.
- Cymbals — Zildjian. 15” A New Beat hi-hats and 14” Z3 hi-hats, and a 21” Z Custom Mega Bell Ride — a cymbal chosen almost entirely for the bell, which is how he marks sections.
- The Olympics kit. He gave a full rundown of the setup used on the Conciergerie balcony, which is a sentence nobody expected to write about a drum rig.
Every era, with buy links, is on Mario Duplantier’s Rig Vault page.
Want the sound without the rig?
The Gojira drum sound is about weight and space, not gear.
Buy one heavy ride with a huge bell. That single cymbal does more for this sound than a new kit would — it is how the sections get marked without a crash cluttering the mix. Our cymbal buying guide covers what a big bell actually buys you.
Then play your toms in unison with the guitar. Not a fill — the same rhythm as the riff, on the floor tom. That is the Gojira trick, and it costs nothing.
And take half your notes out. Genuinely. Record yourself playing a heavy groove, then play it again with half the kick pattern removed. It will sound heavier. The Gear Guru will spec the kit; the restraint is on you.
Where to start listening
- “Flying Whales” (2005). The tom work, and the moment the band arrived.
- “The Art of Dying” (2008). A ten-minute piece that opens with a drum solo and earns it.
- “Stranded” (2016). Sparse, mechanical, and enormous.
- “Amazonia” (2021). Groove, and the least metal thing on Fortitude.
- “Cyclone”. The solo. Watch it twice.
Final thoughts
Duplantier is an antidote to a great deal of modern metal drumming. There is no arms race in his playing, no attempt to be the fastest thing in the room, and no gratuitous fill anywhere in the Gojira catalogue.
What there is instead is judgement — a drummer who has spent thirty years working out exactly which note to leave out. That is a much rarer skill than speed, and much harder to teach.
An Olympic opening ceremony is an odd summit for a French death metal band. On the evidence, they deserved it.
See Mario Duplantier’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Tomas Haake — another European metal drummer who made restraint into a style.