VOIVOD - Vinyl records album Gallery

Voivod crawled out of Jonquière, Québec in 1982, and they never really sounded like they came from any normal scene. One minute it’s speed and thrash grit, the next it’s this bent, progressive geometry that feels like somebody scribbled riffs on graph paper and then set the paper on fire. Punk attitude, prog habits, sci-fi brain. Not a cocktail for polite people.

The funny part is: the band’s “identity” was never one guy doing one thing forever. Lineups shifted, eras happened, arguments happened (you can hear some of them), but Michel "Away" Langevin stayed planted behind the kit the whole time—the real constant. Snake bounced out in 1994 and came back in 2002, which somehow makes the band feel even more like a long-running weird comic series than a normal metal career.

If you want the late-’80s nerve center, it’s "Killing Technology" (1987), "Dimension Hatröss" (1988), and "Nothingface" (1989). I didn’t learn that from a thinkpiece; I learned it from the physical ritual: flipping the sleeve, staring at Away’s art too long, and realizing the songs were built like mazes. The time changes aren’t there to show off—they’re there to keep you slightly off-balance, like the floor moved and nobody warned you.

Piggy died in 2005, and yeah, that hit the whole story like a dent you can’t polish out. They kept going anyway, because apparently that’s what Voivod does: refuse the clean ending, rebuild the machine, take it on the road, prove it still bites. The catalog is deep now—at least fifteen proper studio albums by the band’s own framing, and some counts stretch to sixteen depending on what you file where. Either way, they’re still the kind of band that makes other bands sound a little too comfortable—and honestly, good. Comfort is overrated.

Denis Bélanger is "Snake" on the mic — the voice that makes Voivod feel less like a band and more like a transmission from a busted sci-fi TV. I first ran into them the old way: a beat-up tape handed over like contraband, with that name staring back at me. Snake fronted the band through the classic run, stepped out in 1994, and then came back in the early 2000s (often listed as 2001 to the present) like he’d never really left the room.

Denis D’Amour, a.k.a. "Piggy", played guitar like he was building machines that weren’t fully safe to stand next to. He was there from the band’s early days (commonly dated from 1983) and stayed until his death in 2005 — and yeah, that ending still feels unfair. Calling him "occasionally" anything misses the point: the guitar was the engine, and Piggy kept it running hot.

Jean-Yves Thériault, "Blacky", is the bassist people talk about the way they talk about a specific amp or a specific car: with annoying precision, because it matters. The story isn’t one long continuous stretch — it’s stops and starts. He held down the low end from 1983 to 1991, vanished for a long while, then returned for another serious stretch from 2008 to 2014. That gap isn’t trivia; it’s part of the band’s weather.

Michel Langevin, "Away", is the constant. Drums, yes — but also the visuals, the artwork, the whole weird atmosphere that makes Voivod feel like a world you can accidentally fall into. He’s been there from the early 80s (often listed as 1983) to today, still steering the thing with that calm, relentless presence. If you’re looking for the one member who never blinked, it’s him.