Spiritbox have been on the crest of a wave for years now. From dropping devastating debut Eternal Blue to commanding crowds of thousands, it’s been one triumph after another. As Courtney LaPlante and Mike Stringer explain, though, second album Tsunami Sea simply finds them going with the flow...
A tsunami only truly reveals itself once its waves reach the waterfront. Initially pulsating almost unseen through the depths, in its final form these devastating natural disasters can go on to build a remorseless wall of water, ultimately crushing all in its path.
Courtney LaPlante and Mike Stringer know in their hearts that Spiritbox’s long-awaited second album Tsunami Sea will have the impact its title teases, but even days from release they feel like vessels on the horizon, distanced from those fans waiting eagerly on the shore.
“It doesn’t feel like being ‘on the crest of a wave’ where you’re up there looking down,” Courtney expands the analogy. “It feels like we’re a boat way out in the ocean, with the tsunami passing underneath, unable to really comprehend how it’s going to affect our lives once it finally hits land.”
Spiritbox’s lives have already changed immeasurably. Rising from the ashes of cult mathcore crew iwrestledabearonce back in 2015, Courtney (vocals) and Mike (guitar) alongside relative newcomers Zev Rosenberg (drums) and Josh Gilbert (bass) set out to make music that was darker and more streamlined than what had come before, and became inadvertent beneficiaries of lockdown: songs like Holy Roller and Blessed Be from scintillating debut Eternal Blue chiming with fans desperate for a fresh outlet, and catapulting them to the top of the metal mountain. Since then, they’ve roared from strength to strength, from a tent-crushing Download debut in 2022 to the Reading & Leeds main stages and last month’s sold-out Ally Pally headline.
Fitting as it feels, however, Spiritbox are not the titular tsunami. Rather, countless layers build into the towering concept: the literal reality of a tidal wave, inescapable, dwarfing and destroying everything it washes across; the metaphorical equivalent in mental health when depression and dark thoughts can swamp your mindset; even the experience of life on Courtney and Mike’s native Vancouver Island, unable to leave except by boat. Compared to the immediate thrill-seeking of 2022’s Rotoscope EP and 2023 counterpart The Fear Of Fear, the musical layers of Tsunami Sea stack and dovetail into something more imposing and all-enveloping, emphasising that this is definitively Spiritbox.
“Were the EPs lower-stakes?” Mike ponders. “Not necessarily. But there is room for more experimentation when you’re not worrying about ideas working cohesively within a larger body. The EPs were a cathartic experience, allowing us to release music between massive campaigns. And they allowed us to take our time with the album. Now this is very much the product of a year-and-a-half of writing and narrowing down what we had to the very best songs.”
From pummelling lead single Soft Spine to shapeshifting melodic highlight Perfect Soul and the barnstorming, industrial-inflected 176 seconds of No Loss, No Love, fans will likely already have intuited that these 11 songs represent Spiritbox at their finest. On one hand, getting to tread the grandest stages has honed their instinct for massive moments like lurching epic A Haven With Two Faces. On the other, they have been emboldened to experiment with unexpected sounds like the mercurial drum’n’bass of late highlight Crystal Roses.
“You can’t help but see what happens at the massive shows we’ve gotten to play,” Mike explains. “You start writing music and you don’t think about it, then later on when you first get put in a position where there are 10,000 or 20,000 people in front of you and you play your favourite song, they all just kind of stand there on their phones. Then on another song that you don’t really care about they’re all jumping up and down, losing their shit. You learn to ask, ‘Why is that?!’ It’s not that it feeds into our songwriting so much as it allows us to say, ‘I could see people losing their shit to this!’ Then again, I’m always wrong. My favourite songs are always the ones that are the least streamed. It’s like a curse: ‘Oh, that’s your favourite? Well, no-one is going to give a shit about it…’”
Courtney laughs. “So what’s your favourite on this record that you think no-one will care about?”
“That’s hard to say,” Mike deflects. “It’s always switching…”
“C’mon, you’re obsessed with Black Rainbow…” Courtney’s grin widens. Then she shrugs. “I don’t think about crowd reactions at all. That’s not how I enjoy music. I don’t gauge whether we’re doing a good job or not based off whether people are moshing. Because I [probably] asked them to mosh. If they do, great. That’s how those people enjoy music. But if someone’s just nodding along, maybe that’s how that person enjoys music. And if they’re just standing there absorbing it, I need to not have the ego to think, ‘They’re here to see me.’ Maybe they’re discovering Spiritbox for the first time. Maybe they’re just taking it all in. And sometimes I look out at a crowd all staring back at me, but I’m having the time of my life, singing a song I love. I’m performing, but I also go into my own little world like someone dancing at a wedding! I don’t care if I look stupid.”
Moments of beauty, euphoria and balls-to-the-wall carnage will be in no short supply as listeners crash through Tsunami Sea. This is a band capable of mixing up a salt-syrup mosh confection like Keep Sweet, then just round the corner they’re skimming the glassy alt.pop of Ride The Wave and diving into clean-sung closer Deep End. But everything is underpinned by heartfelt – often heartbreaking – emotion. ‘Sorrow follows me,’ Courtney seethes as thrilling opener Fata Morgana crunches into life. ‘I feel it in my inhale when I breathe…’ That thread of misery doesn’t let up. Even with the constant noise around them, and the taste of triumph, the darkness inside hasn’t run dry.
“It doesn’t matter what amazing stuff happens in my life,” she sighs. “If we don’t take care to work on our mental health we’re always going to feel the ebb and flow of extremes. Especially if you’re someone like me. That’s just how I feel. It’s just part of who I am. Every sad or angry lyric will probably always be relatable to me.
“It’s funny… The more happiness and success in my career I have, or fulfilment I find in my relationships, it’s almost like I get to feel embarrassed for still having those [negative] feelings. A lot of people feel that shame where their mental health can be so low when stuff in their life is great. And I have a compulsion to bare [those feelings] to strangers in the lyrics I write. Maybe it’s a mechanism for better understanding myself. It helps me mitigate what I can to be a good human being while not getting sucked back into that black hole of depression.”
In Spiritbox’s 2023 Kerrang! Cover Story interview, Courtney mused the band were “still figuring out” exactly what they wanted to be, and that they were “too new” to disappoint anyone, regardless of how their next step turned out. In a recent NME chat, they doubled down on the importance of openness and not putting so much stress on creative interests as to distort them: “We make breakdowns and cry over them… It’s not the second coming of a metalcore Jesus Christ!” Given everything that’s happened in recent years – from being declared ‘the future of heavy music’ to grabbing headlines at the GRAMMYs – is keeping a level head easier said than done?
“I think it’s just how we’re always going to be,” Courtney shrugs. “We’ve gotten to experience a lot of cool, crazy stuff over the last few years. We got to walk the red carpet and be interviewed right after [legendary American singer-songwriter] Frankie Valli at the GRAMMYs. But the more we do those things the more we realise how connected we still feel to the times in our lives when we were working minimum wage jobs, doing what we were doing, feeling like we could never get our band off the ground, when it seemed hopeless. That experience feels so much closer to the reality of who we are now than ‘Courtney on a red carpet’. Those events aren’t part of normal life. It’s going to be a long time before we feel comfortable with them. And we don’t really care if they keep happening to us at all. Those aren’t the parties that bands like ours normally get invited to. And when you don’t get invited, you’re hardly going to stand in line waiting to be let in…”
As much as solidarity from the heavy music scene alleviates pressure, the other side of the coin is carrying that community on their shoulders as figureheads for a new generation. Courtney insists that Spiritbox work “with blinkers on, trying not to think about it, and to avoid falling into ‘focus-grouped discussions about strategy’, where music is just a product for someone to consume.” Mike is more ruminative, balancing weight of expectation against obvious pride.
“The more you think about it, the more stressful it becomes,” he smiles. “It’s still very bizarre for us that we can go to the UK and play a sold-out Ally Pally or go do other shows in the middle of nowhere and have everyone know all the words. It’s an odd feeling to think that we, coming from being an internet band born in my parents’ basement, have come to be referred to as ‘future festival headliners’. The pressure is definitely there. But the more that we stay true to ourselves, putting out music we enjoy, the more we can’t be faulted. It is what it is…”
Ultimately, thinking of the satisfaction those kids from 10 years ago would feel to see the band Spiritbox have become is all the motivation they need. Characteristically, Mike ponders what happens when one finally grasps the carrot at the end of the stick. Courtney, on the other hand, insists that 2025’s world-conquering cacophony was simply always coming.
“I’m such a delusional person that I’ve pretty much always known this was how my life was going to end up,” she insists, with tongue only slightly in cheek. “That certainty has always been peppered with extreme self-doubt and imposter syndrome, but it’s always been there. I’ll never forget my 27th birthday as my ‘worst day ever’. I was working at this coffee shop all by myself, where everyone else had called in sick. I was trying to make coffees, trying to make sandwiches, so embarrassed that I was working a minimum wage job on my birthday because I couldn’t afford to take it off. Then someone knocked this jug of milk over and I was down on the floor, cleaning it up, with tears welling up in my eyes surrounded by customers who were getting pissed. I was like, ‘I’m 27 years old, with no education, no money, having just left my old band, and I’m literally crying over spilt milk!’
“Even then, I knew that this was going to happen for me. And we’re still so focused on the next thing that we maybe don’t live in the moment and pat ourselves on the back enough. Having Josh and Zev with us helps. They hold us accountable: ‘You should celebrate this moment. This is a big deal!’ But it’s crazy to think how far we’ve come already. And as long as we stay just a little bit delusional and a little bit self-aware there might be a long way left to go…”
Tsunami Sea is out now via Pale Chord in partnership with Rise Records. Spiritbox play Download Festival on Sunday, June 15 – get your tickets now.
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