Acts: Gojira & Lacuna Coil
Venue: Zagreb / SRC Šalata / Croatia
Date: Sunday, 27 July 2025
Gojira returned to Zagreb after three years. At a time when our outlet is going through a complete transformation, and when an older specimen of my vintage ‘reluctantly’ decides to drag himself to a concert by a band that doesn’t fundamentally mean all that much to him. Yet worldwide hordes of devoted fans — predominantly of the millennial generation — worship Gojira. Which makes the curiosity about what makes them so special simply too strong to resist, one way or another. You know it’s going to be something great — a genuinely new, special, and different kind of event — the sort you’d kick yourself for missing, which is exactly why I made it out to what was Gojira’s third Zagreb show overall. That said, your writer and Gojira aren’t exactly strangers. Way back when, I caught them at an exclusive club show in Roncade near Treviso — 7 June 2016 — while the even more distant (and fleeting) encounter with the band on 13 May 2012 at Udine’s Stadio Friuli — when Gojira (alongside Machine Head) opened for Metallica — has faded from memory all the faster.
And again that weather, thrown in ‘American-style’ — if you read between the lines, you know exactly what I’m hinting at. Half the day gorgeous, then you get in the car and the compass steers you straight into the depths of a black-lead, impenetrable, massive wall of cloud packed with atmospheric moisture from which lightning mercilessly cracks. We managed to outrun one (apparently a new variety of) ‘cell storm’ that was closing in on the Vrhnika hill, but the one that followed during the motorway drive through Krakovo Forest was unavoidable. And looking ahead past Obrežje? No different. No hope.
Somehow or other, the weather managed a rough sort of stability by seven in the evening and, despite all the dripping dampness, at least it wasn’t raining. Šalata was already packed to the gills. Worth mentioning: the show was completely sold out. Italian champions of so-called ‘gothic/alt’ metal Lacuna Coil — signed to the American label Century Media — seemed like the perfect choice for the opening warm-up. The ever-alluring and charismatic Christina Scabbia remains the band’s core attraction. Always. Vocally above all, of course. On record, but especially live. That’s just a fact. The band made excellent use of their 45-minute slot. The quintet is incredibly experienced, seasoned. The show carried real significance for these Milan gothic metal veterans — it was even their Croatian debut, so both Christina and her male vocal counterpart Andrea Ferro repeatedly announced — to loud cheers — what an honour and joy it was to play for a Croatian audience. The band is a well-oiled machine. Tight, confident, and infectious. In the early going, the only thing that slightly undermined the picture was the sound, which by the first half of the set had settled into a commendably listenable level. The quintet also introduced relatively new member and guitarist Daniele Salomone, who joined the fold last year.
The band built their setlist around the new album “Sleepless Empire” while also delivering two tracks from the excellent sixth album “Dark Adrenaline” (Kill The Light, Trip the Darkness). The predecessor “Black Anima” was represented by the opening pair Layers of Time and Reckless. The reimagined “Comalies” track Heaven’s A Lie XX was in there too. Toward the end of the set, the Depeche Mode cover Enjoy the Silence stirred the most excitement in the crowd, and the band left a hugely convincing impression with the closing Oxygen, again taken from the latest album. As noted, Lacuna Coil’s mileage really shows. They work the stage with real finesse, and with their dark musicality — in the supremely seasoned manner of true veterans — they delivered an excellent opening kick!
Gojira are Gojira. This band, with a slightly shorter career than Lacuna Coil — though they’re approaching 30 years of existence all the same — took a surprisingly long time to break through. But when it happened, Gojira became a global attraction virtually overnight. They are unique in every sense and are setting the standard for the modern era of metal. In terms of technical precision, the progressive metal character of compositions infused with death metal motifs, Gojira are absolute standouts at the expressive frontier of what modern metal is currently achieving. Everything is perfectly calibrated. In exactly the right doses. From musicality, progressive depth, and the occasional djent-tinged oddity, to extreme, down-tuned groove salvos generated by avalanche-like guitar phrasing in stark contrast to the drum battery — commanded by the devastating fury of Mario Duplantier’s double bass drum kit. Truly a sinful experience in every sense of the word. Seasoned with volleys of pyrotechnic effects and backdrop stage scenery that once again underlines that Gojira are absolute standouts — venturing deep into the fields of spirituality and philosophy in their lyrics, while maintaining a fighting spirit for the preservation of the environment and nature.
The crowd was theirs that evening. Instantly and completely, it responded with intense, thunderous reactions to every single stimulus that came from the stage. Knowing the lyrics by heart added the perfect finishing touch to the phenomenal concert atmosphere. “Fortitude” and “Magma”, the last two studio albums — cleverly ‘loosened up’ in their arrangements — have conquered the world, and it was truly incredible to watch the crowd literally fuse with the band in one giant chemical reaction. Genuinely great feelings all round. And Gojira, as a unit of just four musicians, are an incredibly compact assault force. Joe Duplantier commanded the evening with supreme authority, drawing out on the growl sections that primal ‘savage instinct’ — a vocal delivery that seems to rise from the throat-depths of some Homo erectus who terrorised four-legged creatures in the era before the first ice age. His brother Mario is a genuine drumming beast who could front any stage in the world. Once again, during one of the breaks, he fired up the crowd with messages written in Croatian on cardboard, and with all those ungodly, storm-force blows coming from beneath his feet, you can’t help wondering how the crew can possibly track down all the nuts and bolts that fly off the drum kit during the show.
Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!) — the track Gojira performed at the recent Paris Olympics, which further cemented their global success — delivered its moment. They had saved it for the closing stretch. From the stage an impenetrable shower of red streamers rains down, blanketing the entire venue! Everything unfolded at a breathless gallop, a tornado of passion and emotion in which any sense of time and space had vanished. Time above all. We’re already into the encore! “L’Enfant Sauvage” had been conspicuously absent, and the encore delivered the goods with the title track! The band also used the encore to pay tribute to the recently departed Prince of Darkness Ozzy, with an interesting choice — covering the Black Sabbath classic Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes. (Normally every band goes for Paranoid or War Pigs, but as noted — not Gojira, who remain in this respect too ‘loveable oddballs riding the apocalypse wave’, full of surprises.)
For the finale, one more incinerating return to “L’Enfant Sauvage” with The Gift Of Guilt — and that was that. The sense of an approaching apocalypse that Gojira had conjured in Zagreb that evening — intentionally or not — was reinforced once again by the rain (believe it or not, genuinely ‘sorely missed’), which started pouring down again just before the mandatory encore, cooling the glowing embers of the crowd’s overheated heads. Because the impressions left by this truly special band were, in every sense, extraordinarily powerful — and at moments, even hypnotic! Let me wrap it up. All in all: absolutely top-tier.
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Text: Edita Klemen & Aleš Podbrežnik
Lacuna Coil – setlist:
1. Layers of Time
2. Reckless
3. Hosting the Shadow
4. Kill the Light
5. Blood, Tears, Dust
6. Heaven’s a Lie XX
7. I Wish You Were Dead
8. Trip the Darkness
9. Enjoy the Silence (orig. Depeche Mode)
10. Oxygen
Gojira – setlist:
1. Only Pain
2. The Axe
3. Backbone
4. Stranded
5. Born for One Thing
6. Flying Whales
7. The Cell
8. From the Sky
9. Another World
10. Silvera
11. Mea culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)
12. The Chant
13. Amazonia
—encore—
14. L’enfant sauvage
15. Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes (orig. Black Sabbath)
16. The Gift of Guilt
