There was no reason for any of this to come out of Jonquiere. It is a small town in the Saguenay region of Quebec, several hours north of Montreal, built around a paper mill and an aluminium smelter, and in 1982 it produced four teenagers who would spend forty years making music that resembles nothing else in metal.
The beginning
Denis Belanger on vocals, Denis D'Amour on guitar, Jean-Yves Theriault on bass and Michel Langevin on drums, working under names taken from a mythology the drummer was already drawing. War and Pain in 1984 is crude, fast and Venom influenced, and the only thing that marks it out is that the band already had a fully realised visual world.
Langevin, who drew everything the band ever used, had invented the Voivod character before there was a band to attach it to. That is the crucial fact: this was a group with a universe first and a discography second, which is close to unique in metal.
The chords nobody else used
Between 1984 and 1987 D'Amour developed a guitar vocabulary with no precedent in heavy music. He wrote using dissonant shapes and intervals that rock guitarists avoid, not out of theory but out of never having been told which ones were forbidden, and the results sound simultaneously wrong and inevitable.
Killing Technology, recorded in Berlin with Harris Johns, is where it arrives. The riffs do not resolve. The chords contain intervals that create tension and then refuse to release it. And underneath, Langevin plays drums that come from progressive rock rather than from hardcore, while Theriault's bass moves against the guitar rather than reinforcing it.
Nothingface
The 1989 album is the one to own. It is calmer than what came before, more spacious, and considerably stranger for being so, and it contains a cover of a Pink Floyd song that arrives as a completely logical extension of what the band was already doing.
It also reached the American charts, which for a record this odd is genuinely surprising, and it remains the point at which the widest audience Voivod ever had discovered them.
| Album | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| War and Pain | 1984 | Crude, fast, and the universe already drawn |
| Rrroooaaarrr | 1986 | Faster, and the strangeness starting |
| Killing Technology | 1987 | The vocabulary arrives |
| Dimension Hatross | 1988 | The concept fully realised |
| Nothingface | 1989 | The masterpiece |
| Angel Rat | 1991 | Lighter, and divisive |
| Katorz | 2006 | Built from D'Amour's last recordings |
What happened after
The band changed shape repeatedly, lost members, gained Jason Newsted on bass for a period in the 2000s, and kept working. Then in 2005 Denis D'Amour died of colon cancer at forty five.
He had recorded guitar tracks for material the band had not finished, and the two albums that followed were built from those recordings. That is an unusual and rather moving way for a catalogue to continue, and it worked because the guitar parts were so completely his that nobody could have replaced them.
Voivod continue with Daniel Mongrain, who has the difficult job of playing a vocabulary invented by somebody else, and they have made several good records since. They were awarded the Juno for metal album of the year in 2019, which is a strange honour for a band from a paper mill town who spent forty years being described as uncategorisable.
Why they matter
Because they are the clearest evidence in this entire history that isolation produces originality. Four teenagers in a town with no scene, working from imported records and their own drawings, arrived at a musical language that trained musicians in cities with full access did not.
Their influence runs sideways rather than downwards: into the dissonant end of death metal, into progressive metal, into bands who have never played anything fast, and into Vektor, who took Nothingface as a starting point rather than as a destination.
Canada produced more than one band who got there before the Americans did, and the other principal case is Annihilator. The wider account of the genre outside America is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.
The universe
It is worth describing, because no other band in this genre committed to anything comparable and it explains why the records sound the way they do.
Michel Langevin invented the Voivod character as a teenager: a figure from a post nuclear future, drawn in a hard edged, angular style that owes something to underground comics and nothing to metal artwork. Across five albums the character travels, encounters a technological civilisation, is absorbed into it and eventually confronts what it has become.
Every sleeve, every logo and a good deal of the lyrical material comes out of that. The band were not illustrating a concept after the fact; the drummer had drawn the world first and the music was written inside it, which is close to unique in heavy music and is the reason the catalogue reads as a single work.
How to listen to them
Start with Nothingface, which is the most hospitable, and give it three plays. The chord voicings register as wrongness on a first hearing and as a language on a third, and there is no shortcut through that.
Then go backwards to Killing Technology and Dimension Hatross, which are harsher and more rewarding once the vocabulary is familiar. Leave War and Pain until last; it is a crude record by a band who had not yet become themselves, and taken first it will simply sound like ordinary 1984 thrash.
The band's own view of it
Consistently modest and consistently accurate. Langevin has said in interviews that the strangeness came from limitation rather than ambition: they could not play what the American bands played, so they played something else, and the something else turned out to be theirs.
That is the same account you get from every band in this history who did something original. Nobody sets out to invent a chord vocabulary. Somebody with no formal training and no access to the people who would correct him writes what sounds right to him, and twenty years later it has a name.
The record nobody has heard
One more Quebec band belongs here and almost nobody outside Canada knows it. DBC, from Montreal, made Dead Brain Cells in 1987 and Universe in 1989, and the second in particular is progressive thrash of real ambition made by people who had clearly listened to Voivod and drawn different conclusions.
It sold nothing, the band stopped, and the records circulate now among the sort of listener who works through a country's catalogue chronologically. That is a familiar ending for this chapter and it is worth recording, because a scene is not only its exports.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Denis D'Amour died on 26 August 2005.
