Experts have long known the Pacific Northwest is a ticking time bomb. For decades, millions living in the stretch from Canada’s British Columbia to the state of California have been warned about ‘The Big One’, an 8.0- or 9.0-magnitude super-earthquake destined to trigger a massive tsunami, which will unleash hell right down the coast. And unfortunately, the science tells us it’s not a matter of if… but when.
Bang in the path of destruction is Vancouver Island, located 60 miles west of Vancouver, across the Strait of Georgia. The island’s capital, Victoria, is the hometown of vocalist Courtney LaPlante and her husband, guitarist Mike Stringer. It’s the place where they masterminded Spiritbox, one of the most hyped and exciting metal bands of the last decade.
Mike was born on the island, and Courtney moved there when she was 15. Both grew up hearing warnings about the tsunami, living under the threat of its looming shadow. “It’s something that is always in the back of our heads,” Courtney admits.
Spiritbox have tapped into that existential dread on the band’s emotionally charged and massively anticipated second album, Tsunami Sea. Combining tech metal, metalcore and nu metal with huge, dense waves of kaleidoscopic and ethereal melody alongside Courtney’s silky-to-explosive vocals, the record is riddled with anxiety and shaped by the duo’s experience growing up on Vancouver Island.
“Courtney, the daughter and sister and friend, loves it, but Courtney the artist doesn’t have a fantastic time there,” explains Courtney.
Her concept of home is a complex one. Having moved to Vancouver Island from Alabama as a teenager, it was the place she found herself, discovering her love for heavy music and realising her ambitions of becoming a musician. But to become successful, she knew she’d need to leave eventually. She points out that to get off the island, the options are to take a flight or a ferry to the mainland, an extra, expensive layer of admin that made their lofty ambitions with Spiritbox feel unachievable.
“Everyone feels like their hometown is isolating if it’s a small town, but ours is figuratively and literally isolating.”
You can hear the ocean throughout Tsunami Sea, particularly on atmospheric album closer Deep End. It’s a deliberate stylistic choice, says Mike, intended to conjure a sense of beauty and trepidation.
“I love layering. I love stacking and making a lot of the ambience. We utilised a lot of nature sounds, whether it was rain, waves, wind… And that’s supposed to be very symbolic of the island.”
On No Loss, No Love, they paint the island as a “venus flytrap”; naturally breathtaking but suffocating, a place that will devour your dreams unless you escape, with the lyrics: ‘I was surrounded by pearls that I couldn’t eat and diamonds I couldn’t drink / An island that breathes is a body that eats.’
“It’s beautiful, it’s incredible, and I can see why people never leave,” adds Mike, who began leaving his hometown to tour with bands on the mainland when he was 16. “Then there’s other people that unfortunately are stuck. The island is very much a bubble, so there is a feeling of, ‘What am I doing? Where am I going from here?’”
We can’t help but wonder who in their right mind would choose to live somewhere like this. “Even with all that in mind, Vancouver Island is one of the most sought-after real estate markets in Canada,” shrugs Mike.
“You can’t get a condo for less than almost a million bucks. People pay that to live in this area because it’s gorgeous, but then in the back of your mind, you’re like, ‘If the earthquake happens, we’re all screwed.’” Courtney laughs ironically. “The tagline for Victoria is, ‘It’s for the newlywed and the nearly dead.’”
These days, Courtney and Mike live in LA, dialling into this interview via Zoom from their bright apartment. The room is stacked with musical equipment, while framed posters of sold-out Spiritbox shows are displayed proudly on the walls. It didn’t take long for Spiritbox to outgrow Vancouver Island. After Courtney and Mike’s previous band – the mathy, jarring iwrestledabearonce – split in 2016, the pair headed home and put their heads together. They wanted to form a band that didn’t tick boxes, making music that was fluid, lush and heavy, and impervious to genre boundaries.
Things soon hit warp speed. In 2020, their nu metal banshee anthem Holy Roller went viral, while the following year’s debut album, Eternal Blue, landed amid a frenzy of hype and expectation. Subsequent EPs – the Garbage/Britpop-tinged Rotoscope (2022) and The Fear Of Fear (2023), which showcased the band at their most rabid and melodic – nailed their signature sound and confirmed they weren’t afraid to chuck in the odd curveball. Tours with Ghost and Slipknot only raised their profile further.
It no longer made sense to pay out for Airbnbs and flights back and forth between Vancouver Island and LA, so Courtney and Mike made the move. Now, the pair are happy and settled. LA, the city where their record label, Pale Chord, is based, feels very much like home, a hub where the band can thrive. Today they’re chatty and relaxed, dressed casually – Courtney in a Korn long-sleeve, a white beanie covering her long black hair, and Mike in a grey hoodie, his hair bleached a shocking blond.
“My team’s become my biggest friend group,” says Courtney. “When I’m back in Canada, sometimes it’s hard for me to find other friends that relate to what I’m doing.”
Last year, former As I Lay Dying bassist Josh Gilbert joined their ranks – his vocals have added an extra layer of oomph to the mix on Tsunami Sea – completing a line-up that also includes drummer Zev Rose, and their career has continued to skyrocket. A few weeks ago, along with Motionless In White and The Plot In You, the band supported fellow genre-mashers Bring Me The Horizon at a sold-out show at Allianz Parque stadium in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in front of 55,000 people. It was BMTH’s biggest headlining show to date, never mind Spiritbox’s. The crowd was biblical.
“It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” smiles Mike. “Once the first flare went off, I was like, ‘Oh, shit, this is insane.’” Courtney smiles. “It made us feel famous!”
Tsunami Sea was produced by Mike and Eternal Blue producer Dan Braunstein, mixed by Zakk Cervini (Limp Bizkit/BMTH/Poppy), and mastered by Ted Jensen (Mastodon /Halestorm). One person who wasn’t on the production team was ex-Bring Me The Horizon member and producer Jordan Fish, whom Courtney and Mike met up with for a casual, three-day writing session in January 2024. When Mike uploaded a behind the scenes, in-the-studio photograph to his social media, it led to rampant online reports that Fish was producing the band’s second album. The band had to come out and clarify the situation, but have said they would love to collaborate with the producer in the future.
There’s plenty of melody on Tsunami Sea – the dreamy title track and misty utopia of A Haven With Two Faces contain the band’s most euphoric choruses to date, but fans will be happy to hear Spiritbox haven’t gone too soft. In its heaviest moments, Tsunami Sea goes much harder than Eternal Blue. The album’s first single was Soft Spine, a monstrous, tech metal ass-beater, which Courtney has taken to dedicating onstage to “Everybody that I love to fucking hate.” It was the path that felt most authentic to them.
“We’ll always try to be what I call ‘hilariously heavy’,” says Mike. “I think we kind of hit a sweet spot with the heavy stuff on this record, where it’s familiar but it’s a step forward.”
What they’ll never do is stand still musically.
“Statistically, if I was to look at the song that broke us out, Holy Roller, it would be more financially stable to just continue only making that,” continues Courtney. “I love an identity crisis, because it helps me not feel like I’m trapped in a box where I have to do this or that.”
The biggest surprise on Tsunami Sea is the track Crystal Roses. Building to an ecstatic peak on a rush of synths, it’s a ravey trip that befits Mike and Courtney’s initial vision of fluidity; the freedom to take Spiritbox wherever the hell they like.
“Each record is a small time capsule; maybe the next album will lean more into the melodic stuff or maybe we’ll have more electronic sounds or whatever,” considers Courtney. “I think it just comes down to whatever we’re interested in at the time. And if that means that we’re genre-less or we just are unpredictable in that way, so be it.”
She finds some of the more territorial, tribal attitudes in metal baffling. “I think there’s an anxiety within the metal community, like abandonment issues. Like, if a single comes out and it’s soft, this band are now betraying me and moving on to something else.”
When it comes to songwriting, the band write “selfishly”, for themselves, not the fans. “It has to be like that, because otherwise we’ll just go crazy trying to focus-group what people want.”
It’s a mindset that’s led to several exciting collaborations over the last few years, with artists from right across the metal spectrum, many of them women. At Louder Than Life Festival last September, they brought out rising metalcore star Poppy for Soft Spine and Jinjer’s Tatiana Shmayluk for Circle With Me. The latter performance was particularly formidable… and wasn’t even rehearsed.
“That was our first time ever interacting with one another,” says Courtney. “The first time I saw Tati was when she was ready to come up onstage and do the set. Those people don’t need to rehearse, they just walk out. She could have done three hours like that and sounded good the whole time.”
“Having her in my ears was nuts,” adds Mike. “She sounded like a demon.”
In October, after folk metal singer Chelsea Wolfe performed a sparse cover of Spiritbox’s Cellar Door on the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show, Courtney invited her onstage to perform single Jaded with the band at Korn’s 30th anniversary show in LA. In an industry where women are perennially pitted against one another, it’s important to Courtney to support and work with other female artists.
“There can only be one of us that’s the best one, when in reality, none of us ever think about that,” she says, in reference to the outdated attitude of allowing space for one female artist instead of accepting that they can co-exist. “We are all multifaceted musicians, just like all of our male counterparts are, but they never get questioned about that.”
Spiritbox’s biggest gamble came later that month, when they appeared on TYG, a track on rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s 2024 album, Megan: Act II. (The band previously appeared on a remix of Megan’s track Cobra in 2023.) TYG sounds like two worlds colliding, with Megan diving headfirst into the metal vibe and Courtney adding ferocious backing vocals over clipped drums, crunchy guitars and gold-plated synths. It was put together remotely in just two days, forcing slower-paced, self-confessed perfectionists Courtney and Mike out of their comfort zone.
“We’ll overthink something for, like, two months. They’re like, ‘That sounds great. Let’s get it out!’” says Courtney of Megan and her team’s spontaneous approach. She did eventually meet the rapper, later in LA. “I was emotionally moved by watching her interact with her fans, and then the fact that she’s an incredible rapper and dancer is icing on the cake.”
As the band’s profile has rocketed, Spiritbox have had to consider how they interact with their own fans. “Things used to be more casual,” Courtney admits.
She enjoys the “deep relationship” she shares with Spiritbox fans, even following some of them online herself, but is hyper-aware of parasocial relationships that can develop on social media, stating it “is not healthy for me and it’s not healthy for the fan”.
“I really do care about them, but I also don’t want to play a role in their life I don’t deserve, where I’m influencing them too much, at best,” she explains. “And then, at worst, it breeds entitlement. And just like anything in my life, I need boundaries.”
That entitlement took an ugly turn earlier this year. Spiritbox were in Europe supporting Korn when they heard the news their former bassist, Bill Crook, who had amicably left the band in 2022, had passed away.
“I don’t need to tell you that finding that out was the worst thing that’s ever happened to us in our lives,” says Courtney quietly.
Shocked and devastated, they wanted to drop out of the Korn dates, but powered on, trying to process their grief privately. A minority of fans were critical of the way they handled the situation.
“It felt like people were unhappy that we didn’t post [on social media] immediately upon Bill’s passing,” Courtney continues. “It made me think a lot about performative grieving. I don’t mean performative like, ‘You don’t feel that way.’ I mean it’s literally a performance. We’re here grieving, but then there’s this attitude of ‘You must perform your grief.’”
The experience was an eye-opener, a hard lesson in the modern realities and expectations of celebrity. “It really shook us,” says Mike. “Like, ‘Oh, my God, if you don’t press a button on an app, that means to the outside world that you don’t care, when in reality, this is the worst day of my life.”
Tsunami Sea was completed long before Bill’s death, but his presence looms large over the record.
“We still think about him in decision-making to the point where we thought we should put out Perfect Soul as a single,” smiles Mike. “Bill probably would have liked that song the most, because Bill loved butt rock riffs, and to me, the beginning of that song is so, like, Nickelback-butt-rocky…”
“You’re really selling it, Michael,” Courtney cuts in, dryly. “No, no, I love that!” Mike protests. “Nickelback are one of my favourite bands!”
Like Eternal Blue, much of Tsunami Sea sees Courtney exploring the feelings of depression and anxiety she’s experienced all her life. The album title, she says, is “the perfect description of what it feels like to be engulfed in your own emotions and in sadness”.
“Everything Michael writes either has this tension in it, or the guitar has this melancholy to it that invokes sad feelings about myself,” she says. “I think a lot of the time, art is a need people have, to have people understand them, so, I think it will help people understand me a little bit better. It makes me feel like I’m better understanding myself, too.”
Saying that, during the writing and recording process, a wave of depression hit her hard, and she found herself overcome with feelings of guilt. To an outsider, her life was great. She and Mike had just got a new puppy called Spaghetti. She was loving her life living in LA, surrounded by friends. The band were playing the biggest shows of their career, travelling all over the world. Why did she feel like this when she was living her dream?
“This album is a peek into those dark feelings you have, and you almost feel ashamed that you’re being such a freaking baby about stuff, you know?” she says. “I was really going through a really rough time when I was recording it. The screaming parts were letting out a lot of anger, but the singing parts made me really sad.”
She casts an appreciative glance over at her partner. “But it’s just a part of my personality, and I’m so lucky I have Michael to help me go through all that.”
While Courtney admits she is still often overwhelmed by intrusive feelings of imposter syndrome, likening her depression to a tide that “ebbs and flows”, when she’s onstage she’s at her most confident. That’s been a work in progress. Compare some of Spiritbox’s recent live performances with earlier shows, when nerves were palpable, and her growth as a live performer is clear to see.
In footage of their show at Chicago’s Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, supporting Korn, along with Gojira, on their North American tour, she’s never looked more comfortable or commanding, joking with the 28,000-strong crowd. Meanwhile, the band cite the tour as a career-so-far highlight, when they could sense the momentum around the band continuing to build.
“Those shows were beyond any drug that you could take,” says Mike happily. “We’ve done tours in the past where we’ve been the opening act, and we call it ‘being the Hot Dog Band’, where people are getting their beers and their hot dogs and they’re walking in when we’re halfway through. But on this tour, there was a shift where it felt like people were coming in early and they were making sure to check us out.”
With Tsunami Sea set to drop on March 7, Spiritbox are eyeing up what will surely be their biggest year yet. The band have been nominated for their second Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance, for 2023 single Cellar Door (they were also nominated in 2023 for the track Jaded, although they lost out to Metallica’s 72 Seasons).
This year, the competition is no less fierce, as they’re up against Knocked Loose and Poppy’s collab Suffocate, and Gojira, Marina Viotti & Victor Le Masne’s Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!) – the song they performed at the 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony among a crowd of beheaded Marie Antoinettes. As honoured as she is to be nominated, Courtney is looking at the bigger picture.
“If us, Gojira or Knocked Loose win, then a woman will win a metal Grammy, which would be really cool.”
In February, Spiritbox headlined London’s 10,250- capacity Alexandra Palace, traditionally the final stepping stone in the UK before bands graduate to arena-level shows. In June, they will support the wildly successful new iteration of Linkin Park at a sold-out Wembley Stadium, as well as playing Download, a festival many fans and industry folk think they could headline in future. With heights this dizzying, it’s easy to forget the band have just one full-length record and one headline UK tour under their belts. As far as they’re concerned, the hard work is just beginning.
“We still have so much to prove, and I’m really hoping that people can hear that in this record,” says Mike. “We care so much about every facet of it – sonically, visually, the artwork, everything entwined with the story. I hope that people like it enough that we’ll be able to make another record…”
“We’re just getting started!” adds Courtney. “We make it a joke, but deep down, the goal is world domination.”
Tsunami Sea is out March 7 via Pale Chord/Rise Records
