“I want lightning to strike twice,” says Courtney LaPlante. Spiritbox’s electrifying breakout single ‘Holy Roller’ was an impulsive 2020 release, shared because the band had grown restless discussing logistics for a debut album still being recorded in their producer Dan Braunstein’s kitchen. With the band working full-time jobs, it was the most finished song they had.
But the furious track exploded, and Spiritbox emerged as metal’s next great hope while the scene at large struggled to find compelling new voices. ‘Constance’, written about “losing someone you love, before you’ve even lost them”, added more fuel to the hype train, as did a string of horror-inspired music videos.
It was a lot for a band who’d spent the previous few years pretty much left to their own devices. “To suddenly have all these people and institutions being so over the top about our band was very overwhelming,” says Courtney. “It was too much for me.”
By the time their delayed debut album ‘Eternal Blue’ arrived in 2021, Spiritbox were one of the most exciting heavy bands around, even if they’d only set out to make songs they loved. She’s uncertain why ‘Eternal Blue’ resonated so deeply, but suggests it’s the atmosphere. “There’s so much tension and sadness in the music. If you took that away, it wouldn’t be Spiritbox” – and it certainly wouldn’t hit as hard. “It’d be like watching a scary movie with the volume down.”
When they were finally able to hit the road for an 18-month victory lap, the band had to try and catch up with how quickly things had changed. “I don’t envy people like Chappell Roan who really do rocket,” says Courtney. The leap from intimate venues to festival crowds was “crazy,” she admits. But after more than a decade of slogging it out in cult passion projects, “we were always waiting for the crash.”
It never came though and now the band are back with their jaw-dropping second album ‘Tsunami Sea’. If you want an idea of the ambition, the first show of Spiritbox’s new era is a massive gig at London’s Alexandra Palace. “It’s taken us a long time to scale up,” says Courtney. “Now I feel ready.”
“It was written as I tried to pull myself out of depression”
Like crossover titans Bring Me The Horizon, Spiritbox craft heavy music with a pop twist. ‘Tsunami Sea’’s opener ‘Fata Morgana’ (which means mirage) is a hulking flex, but the record also playfully dives into post-rock (‘No Loss, No Love’), drum & bass (‘Crystal Roses’) and R&B (the title-track) without losing its edge. “Hopefully, that’s exciting. I want people to feel that roller coaster of ‘What’s going on here?’,” says Courtney. “I want them to be pushed and pulled in different directions because that’s how I feel sometimes.”
Courtney is speaking to Dork a couple of weeks before Christmas. The band have just played their last show of the year, but they’re already counting down the days until they can do it again. “We hope that gig at Ally Pally will show people what a Spiritbox arena show would look like,” she says. Their production draws inspiration from artists like Beyonce, favouring precision over spectacle. “It’s going to be very ambitious for a band at our level. But it’ll never take away from the main thing, which is singing songs with people.”
While their live vision is clear, Courtney is still processing ‘Tsunami Sea’. “I haven’t figured out my elevator pitch for this album yet,” she starts. “But lyrically, it’s me getting out onto paper the enormous amount of depression that I’ve gone through my entire life. Then there’s the existential dread, that I fear all the time, that I’m not good enough, and because of that, all this is going to be washed away.”
“It’s not me asking for help; it’s more empowering than that, but it was written as I tried to pull myself out of depression,” she continues. “There is a guilt that comes with finally living out your dreams, but not being able to defeat your brain.” She compares the push and pull of her own mental health with the ebb and flow of the ocean, “which is the scariest, strongest and most mysterious thing on the planet.”
It’s where the name ‘Tsunami Sea’ came from, with the loose concept album acting as a follow-up to 2023’s ‘Fear Of Fear’ EP (which explored “fate and the powerless feeling that comes with existential crises”) and serving as a sister record to ‘Eternal Blue’. “It’s really difficult for me to explain how I’m feeling, so I find it easier to explain it in metaphor,” she says of the record’s lyrics. “Maybe we’d be more successful if I did just write more direct lyrics but just the idea of it makes me feel really uncomfortable.”
Even with those stories of mania, depression and fear wrapped up in twisting metaphors, Courtney was reluctant to actually sing them in the studio. “I knew it would make me upset, and I didn’t want to manipulate my sadness in that way.” To her surprise, the physical act of singing those lyrics helped her through a bad time. “It’s weird because you feel awful, and then you feel guilty for feeling awful. It shook me to get help, though. I feel like you can hear that in the songs.”
“I’d love for this album to be a cathartic thing for people because it was really cathartic for me,” she adds.
Since the start, Spiritbox has been a collaboration between Courtney and her husband/guitarist Mike Stringer. They first crossed paths in Canada’s DIY metal scene before he joined Unicron, the Rage Against The Machine-inspired band founded by Courtney and her little brother Jackson. They went on to play together in proggy metalcore group Iwrestledabearonce for a few years before leaving to do something that felt more them.
With Spirirtbox, Mike will typically craft a number of different ideas that express how he’s feeling and whenever the mood strikes, Courtney will build on the ones that feel the most interesting. For ‘Tsunami Sea’, they aimed for sonic extremes and wanted the songs to transcend mere kick-ass riffs, but mainly focused on, “What’s the coolest thing we could do here?”
Having made music together for over a decade, their biggest lesson isn’t about creating viral hits, but the importance of making art they truly love – because that’s all you can really be sure of. “I let myself live in a bubble and not try to analyse the whys of what I’m doing,” Courtney says, not wanting to limit where Spiritbox can go. “Maybe someday we’ll think about it a bit more intellectually, but right now, I like how innocent it is.”
After ‘Jaded’, ‘The Void’ and ‘Circle With Me’ became surprise rock radio hits, some fans worry about Spiritbox chasing mainstream success with ‘Tsunami Sea’. “I’d welcome it with open arms, but we’re too riffy to crossover, really,” says Courtney. “Metal fans do have this stress and anxiety about their favourite bands betraying them, but they can also get blinded by a catchy vocal line. They forget that for the average music fan, it is really hard to latch on to what the fuck we’ve got going on,” she adds. “If we really wanted to maximise profits, I would just remake ‘Holy Roller’ again and again.”
Like fellow ‘pop-metal’ artists Sleep Token, Poppy, Scowl, Bad Omens and Knocked Loose, Spiritbox have introduced fresh elements to heavy music and look beyond the scene for inspiration. Going into ‘Tsunami Sea’, Spiritbox’s discography consisted of a handful of EPs and one full-length. “We don’t really have a lot of practice writing songs,” she admits. “So, every time we do, we get better at doing what we want to do and not just what we should do. Sometimes, it might be a little novel, but we don’t really care if it makes someone think we’re weird. We just do what feels the most fun.”
“People act like we’re so out there with our influences, but if you compare us to Doja Cat or Paramore… they’re artists who really do pull from all over. But for a metal band, there are a lot of different emotions and influences to this album,” Courtney explains, citing Remi Wolf, TLC, Kate Bush, Chelsea Wolfe, Janet Jackson and Massive Attack – AKA, “artists that deliver an incredibly technical vocal performance, but also really nail the emotion of the song.” She also loves Ethel Cain. “A lot of the songs are so strange, and they’re someone who can write a concept album, but every song still delivers something touching.”
She loves pop, R&B and hip-hop, so why dedicate her life to metal? “It feels angry and evil, but there’s something so calming to me about heavy music,” Courtney explains. “There are bands such as Knocked Loose that I listen to when I’m feeling angry, but in general, I just love the groove. It’s what I’m drawn to when I want a brain massage.”
She believes metal feels vibrant now because of the “huge fanbase of young women” drawn in by those ‘pop-metal’ bands. “Their music is a beacon that’s calling out to more than one demographic of people, which is awesome. Pop culture has always been shaped by young women, and that’s something the world of metal was lacking until very recently. For the first time, women are now defining what’s popular.”
“Look at an act like Bring Me The Horizon, who are living out all our dreams,” she says of where the bar sits for that new generation of bands. “It’s very inspiring. I like being excited by my peers, but whenever they do something cool, it makes me want to rise to the occasion and do something cool as well.”
Spiritbox have taken many bold steps in recent years but teaming up with Megan Thee Stallion on the ‘Rock Remix’ of ‘Cobra’ and ‘Act 2’’s ‘TYG’ might be the boldest.
“I knew right away that it would weed out the people that I didn’t want listening to our band,” Courtney grins, having already caused a mini-Twitter storm for jokingly describing her band as “male-reared”, a fun twist on the tired “female-fronted” label. “The most eye-rolling thing about those collabs was the pearl-clutching that came from the sexual lyrics, even though most of the people complaining had spent their lives listening to Mötley Crüe and AC/DC.”
“I’m really happy we did it, though. I hope a rapper hears those songs and feels inspired to get some heavy shit in their music as well. And talk about someone who is confident; Megan knows what she wants immediately, and that was really inspiring to be around.” If she ever wants to do a full-length team-up, Spiritbox are ready.
“Sometimes the things that make you feel very alienated and isolated can be empowering”
‘Tsunami Sea’ is an album about searching for belonging. It ties into growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, a city on Vancouver Island. Making metal music with her brother and choosing basement shows over a 9-5 meant she often felt different from others. “I did spend a lot of time feeling misunderstood. It’s an isolating feeling that is also very universal,” she explains, noting how people in towns and suburbs worldwide experience the same. “The dream is to go to a place where people understand you.” And Courtney’s found that with Spiritbox.
“I used to have such dread about standing on stage and not feeling empowered, or seeing our fans and knowing they wouldn’t like me if we sat down and had a conversation about human rights,” says Courtney. “But when I look out into the crowd at our shows, I feel understood. I can see people being affected by what I’m saying, and it feels like we’re all in this thing together.”
It’s more complex than escaping your hometown and finding peace in community, though, especially after Courtney endured years of sexist abuse from metal fans. She’s had to stop searching for Spiritbox on Reddit because people keep posting photos of her in inappropriate subreddits. “It makes me sad because it stops me from enjoying all the other things people are doing [around our band]. But I can’t get the good without the bad, and the bad is really bad for my state of mind.”
“There are so many repressed feelings that come from working in a field dominated by people who’ve never had to understand or empathise with you, just because they’re seen as ‘the default’,” she explains. “It makes you feel paranoid. ‘Am I overthinking things, or did they just say something very fucked up’ or ‘Why did I giggle to make that person feel better when they made me feel uncomfortable?’ That’s really common for a lot of us, and it makes you feel crazy,” she explains. That anger is channelled into ‘Tsunami Sea’.
“I hope that when men hear this album, they get what I’m talking about. And when women hear it, they feel heard. The cool thing about music is that I can convey a message, and we don’t have to explain to each other what we’re talking about because we’ve been affected by those same things, and there’s an understanding.”
The record closes with ‘Deep End’, which embraces the calm, cleansing power of heavy music. Rather than a happy ending, there’s still uneasiness and anxiety. “You’re still in a limbo. You’re worried you don’t deserve to be where you want to be, but you don’t feel a sense of belonging where you’re forced to be either. It’s the regret of feeling like you’re not good enough for somebody, but you would have been willing to do anything for them to not leave you,” Courtney explains. “I find music that feels like it’s about two people is a great vehicle to talk about something else that you’re anxious about. That song wasn’t written about a specific person, but often it feels like it’s about the people in my life that allow me to make the art that I make, which is the people that listen to our music.”
There’s confidence in this Spiritbox record. It doesn’t repeat what the band have done before, nor does it defiantly push against what made them popular. It’s a swaggering, emotional evolution that’s both intricate and immediate. Two months after first hearing it, it’s still on the Dork HQ stereo daily. “Sometimes the things that make you feel very alienated and isolated can be empowering,” says Courtney who hopes people understand that it’s okay to feel that way. “I want people to really hear our band and know you can make whatever music you want. We’re not self-conscious about who we really are.”
Spiritbox know they’ve got something to prove with ‘Tsunami Sea’, especially after the success of ‘Eternal Blue’. “You can’t always outdo your last thing commercially, but I know that we’ve outdone it artistically,” Courtney says. “I want to show people that a weird band like us can do it again, and we don’t have to compromise. I want to show people that we’re here to stay.” ■
Taken from the March 2025 issue of Dork. Spiritbox’s album ‘Tsunami Sea’ is out 7th March.
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