CAR BOMB’s GREG KUBACKI on SUN GUTS instrumental project, playing guitar for GOJIRA

Greg Kubacki’s tech-djent riffage will melt your face off, and in the weirdest ways possible.

Last year, the New York-based fretboard phenom delivered uniquely engine-revving texturing and concussively explosive songcraft through longtime band Car Bomb‘s Tiles Whisper Dreams EP. This month, he’s vortexing us towards a galaxy of space-lasering pew-pew-pews and reality-warping pedal effects on Kilonova, the deranged and damned entertaining debut album from his new Sun Guts solo project. What might’ve fried Kubacki’s own perception of reality most in 2025, however, was his highly publicized guest stint on Gojira’s most recent, pyro-heavy Tour de France.

Kubacki and the Gojira crew go way back — Car Bomb drummer and recording engineer Elliot Hoffman co-founded Silver Cord Studio in Brooklyn, New York, with Gojira vocalist-guitarist Joe Duplantier; Duplantier co-produced Tiles Whisper Dreams; Kubacki played onstage with the French metal vets in Portland a few years back. Late last fall, though, another crossover opportunity arose when Duplantier popped into their local drinking hole with an injured arm.

“It was Joe’s birthday, and we were at a bar, Duff’s in Brooklyn, which is, like, the hangout spot for all metalheads, and where Car Bomb hang out all the time,” Kubacki recalls, adding that he noticed right away that his friend’s arm was slung in a wrap. While concerned for Duplantier, he also floated an idea to help Gojira through their recovery period.

“I was like, ‘You know who to call if you need a little help, there.’ But [Joe] was like, ‘It’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.’ But then a week later, he was like, “Hey, you wanna go to France for a couple weeks?” I was in, immediately.” Kubacki ended up taking over Duplantier’s guitar duties for a dozen shows across France — Gojira’s vocalist still stalked the stage to scream through heavy favorites like “Flying Whales” and “Global Warming.”

While Car Bomb have been playing the club circuit since forming in 2000, the Gojira tour had Kubacki performing in European arenas for upwards of 20,000 metal fans. Thousands more are now keeping their eyes affixed on the guitarist’s Instagram page, while his vivid, viscerally conceptual playing style has garnered great praise from guitar legends like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Living Colour’s Vernon Reid. And things are only getting brighter for Kubacki fans, via Sun Guts’ inspired debut release.

Kubacki explains that his self-described “ignorant instrumental mathcore” project arose as a home-recording project, and as a way to release music quickly as Car Bomb were slowly putting together another release. Streamlining the process on his own has been a revelation to him. “The best thing is you can make a metal record at home now, pretty much. So, when it’s done, you’re like, “Oh, I don’t have to teach [this to] anybody.”

Kilonova surges with the same kinds of surreal, effects-blown djenting as Kubacki’s work with Car Bomb, but he also highlights how its tunes aren’t just pedal-to-the-metal blurs of technical frenzy. He’s now occasionally glazing songs with heavy shoegazing ambiance, reflective of his fandom for Hum and Deftones, among others.

That said, Kubacki’s songwriting aesthetic can’t fully escape chaos. A love of science steered him towards naming the collection Kilonova, and like the outer space occurrence of two neutron stars colliding and creating a black hole, Sun Guts’ ideas-jammed debut threatens to violently pull us into another dimension.

“One of the things I love in the song ‘Kilonova’ is how it’s got this Sanguisugabogg breakdown thing that gets heavier and heavier, but it dies, and then it lifts up into this shoegazy, ethereal buildup. Then goes into this weird solo,” he says.

“It goes in these different directions that you wouldn’t think it would go in, and it’s almost like the energy inside the sun’s trying to find its way out.”

How did you end up putting together this instrumental LP as Sun Guts, instead of working on these songs with Car Bomb?
Greg Kubacki I don’t think the songs were particularly not Car Bomb songs… I just think, with Car Bomb, we like to take our time and make sure what we’re doing is something that we all really believe in. Then I was thinking, while that was cooking, “Why not just put out some stuff out that I’ve had laying around?”

The Sun Guts stuff is more 4/4 at times, which is [a time signature] that we tend not to do in Car Bomb. And it’s also maybe a little more shoegazy, or a little more post-rock — I really like bands like Hum and Failure. We do a little bit of that in Car Bomb, but that’s the kind of stuff I wanted to explore more on my own.

You mentioned being influenced by Hum and Failure, but is there any doom or sludge in your background? There’s something to “Slop Tactics” that sounds Southern, like Down. Or maybe the harmonies are like old Cathedral?
Maybe not doom, but [it’s] on the low-end spectrum. That’s another thing with Sun Guts that I really wanted to explore. I love really warm low-end, like Deftones’ “Around the Fur.” Like, you know, in the third verse, when it’s just the bass [going] “Woof”? I want that sort of bass in the stuff I’m doing for this.

Bands like Torche have sort of a doomy thing. They’re upbeat and poppier, but they also have hardcore breaks. I really like that. Hum was another band that just has that low-end-y type of thing. From the Southern stuff, though, I really like Eyehategod’s Dopesick record.

Though Kilonova can be a wildly inventive and technical record, what is the primal attraction you have to those moments where the “low string goes bong” as you put it in an Instagram post recently?
Honestly? It just sounds amazing.

There’s something about when Meshuggah ends the song, and it’s just that one note ringing out for 30 seconds in the arena. That sound is just so iconic. [Car Bomb] pay homage to Meshuggah in our stuff, and I think I go a little overboard with [it in] this project as well.

What was it like to not factor in vocals, or the rest of a band?
The one thing that really attracted me to this project was the immediacy of being able to put stuff out after I write it. The first three songs — “Kilonova,” “La Grande” and “Asphyxia” — I wrote really quick. To be able to put it out while I’m still excited is phenomenal. It feels really good.

With Car Bomb, we gotta play that stuff live. Mike [Dafferner, vocals] does his amazing stuff, Elliot [Hoffman, drummer] does his amazing stuff, Jonny [Modell, bassist] does his amazing stuff. It needs more time to stew. I love that band, but it’s also nice to have this thing where it’s like, “Oh, I can just put this out right now.”

Since you mentioned it by name, which song has the sicker riffs: Sun Guts’ “La Grande” or ZZ Top’s “La Grange”?
I mean… I would give it to ZZ Top, because they started the seed. Metallica was inspired by them, Meshuggah was inspired by Metallica, and I was inspired by Meshuggah. So, let’s just give it to them. [Laughs]

2025 was super busy for you, between the release of the Car Bomb EP, working on Sun Guts in the background, and then, right at the tail end of the year, you toured Europe with Gojira as Joe’s guitar fill-in. Since there’s a lot of history between Car Bomb and Gojira, getting the call from Joe when they needed another set of hands seemed like the natural course of action…
I filled in for Christian [Andreu] a couple years ago… I played a show with them at the Trail Blazers arena in Portland [ed. Moda Center]. I played one song, and I just got this taste of, like, “Oh man… I gotta do this again.”

As soon as I got that call [ed. from Duplantier], I was like, “I know what to do, I know how to practice, I have the gear ready, let’s just go.”

Me and Joe rehearsed together for three weeks at Silver Cord with Johann Meyer, who is their sound engineer. They record a lot of stuff live, so they were able to mix in a lot of tracks and just have me and Joe play along to their live performance. [By the time] we were in France, we were ready to go.

Were you familiar with all of those riffs to begin with?
A lot of them! They played a lot of older stuff [on that tour]. Like, we played “Born in Winter,” “Global Warming,” “Wisdom Comes,” and “From the Sky.” Like, “From the Sky” was my gateway drug into Gojira, so I felt really lucky to be able to play that with them onstage, and just look over to my right and see [drummer] Mario [Duplantier]’s feet just go duh-duh-duh-duh for five minutes, which is amazing.

The hardest part, I guess, was the stuff we don’t do in Car Bomb. We don’t really pay attention to the way a song ends. We don’t really pay attention to clean-tone parts, or the little stuff in-between songs. But it was fun, man. It was really cool.

Did they give you grace to add a little bit of Greg into those riffs?
Not really in the riffs, but in the solos. And I learned a lot from Joe about how he approaches soloing, especially with melody. Besides it being awesome playing in arenas and hanging out with those guys again, learning how they approach melody with guitar and then being able to add my stuff to it kind of made [it] something new [for me].

For “Stranded,” there’s a little solo section in there and Joe was like “Go for it,” and I just started doing this tapping thing — a little guitar hero stuff. But no pew-pews or anything like that. That’s not the Gojira sound.

What was it like looking out at those massive European crowds?
It was amazing. You kind of get used to the size, which is weird.

Car Bomb is used to playing in clubs — we’re used to having people in our face. [Gojira] had me on a riser in the back with Mario, and I was always chomping at the bit to get to the front and run around and start interacting with people. The crowd was amazing. Full of energy. Really receptive. It was unbelievable.

For the last song, “Global Warming,” Joe does this thing where he cues the crowd to use their phone flashlights and do the wave with him. To all of a sudden see the whole arena light up with all these phones [was] insane. It was really cool.

Could you see either Car Bomb or Sun Guts’ music working in a stadium setting?
I don’t think Car Bomb would work there, because it’s so fast. The industry secret is if you want to play stadiums, you gotta play slower.

Like, Tool is like the epic [stadium] band. Just hit a D chord and let it ring out for 30 seconds, and it sounds amazing as it decays. They’re the masters of texture and building atmosphere.

Maybe Sun Guts would do that, but I don’t think the dudes in Car Bomb would want to do that. I think they just want to keep it as brutal and heavy as possible. But you never know!

People have been reacting to Car Bomb and Sun Guts stuff online, like other guitarists making their own playthroughs of your music. Living Colour’s Vernon Reid also gave Car Bomb some great praise in Guitar World, recently. How do you react to those reactions?
We’re always amazed. Like, Joe Satriani reached out. Steve Vai follows me [on Instagram]. I’m just like, “What the hell?” People I’ve been listening to forever, and that I worship, like what I do…it’s humbling.

With the fans, that’s always great, too. I have no complaints about it. I mean, some people say [Sun Guts] sounds a lot like Car Bomb, and they’re right. I write music the same way for everything.

With the reactions we get from people like Vernon, or being able to play with Joe [Duplantier], it just makes you want to do more. That’s the goal with Sun Guts 2. Let’s keep putting stuff out. Let’s keep writing. Let’s see what else we can do!

Sun Guts 2 is already in production. I’ve got a bunch of songs for that. Most of them are 50 per cent cooked, so hopefully sometime this year it’ll come out. Car Bomb’s gonna kick back in, too.

Do you think Sun Guts will ever become a live band?
I think for now it’s just a recording thing. But eventually, yeah… if Sun Guts gets a following, and there’s a demand for it, then absolutely.

But it’s also nice [to not play live]. Last year was just so much touring. I’m really stoked to be home and work on music at the same time.

This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.