Spiritbox: Meet The New Face Of Heavy Music
Cast your mind back to the dark days of 2020 and there can be few positives drawn from a year that was unlike no other. After COVID-19 hit in March and people withdrew into their homes, the world in which we once knew was left behind. As bands worldwide tried to grapple with the new reality and adjust in a time where live performances and touring was on hiatus, the online space became even more vital for making a name for yourself. Enter SPIRITBOX. In July 2020, Holy Roller was unleashed and the reaction was incendiary. Millions of views and countless reaction videos, SPIRITBOX erupted onto the scene and presented themselves as one of the most talked about names on the scene.
If there was any niggling doubts or fears that Holy Roller would prove to be just a flash in the pain or a one hit wonder for SPIRITBOX, then subsequent singles such as Constance, Circle With Me and Secret Garden demonstrated that the band are in fact much more multi-faceted and genre-fluid than meets the eye, sending the band’s popularity to unfathomable heights. For vocalist Courtney LaPlante, as the single-song format of their releases unveiled layer after layer of the SPIRITBOX soundscape, her biggest fear is fucking it up and letting the soaring momentum slip right between her fingers.
“I don’t want to fuck it up. In my head at all times, Ru Paul’s Drag Race. She says before they lip sync for their life ‘the time has come for you to lip sync for your life. And then she ends it with good luck, and don’t fuck it up’. So like, in my head, that’s all I hear is Ru Paul telling me ‘don’t fuck it up’. Because like, you know, there’s been so many bands in the situation that we’re in right now with just everything lined up. And they’re about to break out into what they’ve been working towards their whole life. And they fucked it up. Because they did something, something was wrong, they didn’t do a good enough job or didn’t roll it out properly,” she explains, before expanding on how the band have been able to react in real-time to ensure their growth is maintained.
“It’s just about reacting. So everything we do, we have the advantage of people assuming a grand plan. But it’s all just been a reaction. So like, we put Holy Roller out because we had an extra like three minutes to fill up on the AFTER THE BURIAL tour that we had to play. We just did that and made our video and everything’s reactive. Like we didn’t have a grand plan of like ‘yeah, like this is gonna be a novelty and get everyone turning heads’. We were just like, ‘this song is awesome and makes us really happy’. Let’s make a music video for it because nothing else is happening. Everything’s cancelled. Let’s focus our energy on something that we can control.”
Control that they did and now, SPIRITBOX stand on the precipice of unleashing Eternal Blue, their debut full-length record. A colossal, utterly dynamic and thoroughly engaging body of work, the record showcases a band that is not only comfortable in their own skin, but collectively, willing to challenge the pre-determined confines of genre. Holy Roller and Yellowjacket bulldoze their way through dense passages of down-tuned riffing whilst Secret Garden soars and the likes of Constance and We Live In A Strange World shimmers with gorgeous fragility. Whilst each single release has gone down a storm in the scene, as a complete body of work, the fluidity in how SPIRITBOX ebb and flow through their soundscape is marvellous, something that Courtney explains is key to the record’s impact.
“You can expect fluidity. It’s a collection of songs that are all tied together by time. And whether we like it or not, the themes are all woven in to the songs, and they’re all tied together just because they were all kind of made in a period of our lives that we were all collectively trying to figure out what type of music we wanted to make. I hope that it’s something that someone can listen to, repeatedly, from front to back with just being at the right amount of stimulation and never feeling like it’s too much or overstimulated.”
Tied together by time could be concluded as the result of a happy coincidence but there is a level of precision in the way in which LaPlante and co have ensured that Eternal Blue is as dynamic as humanely possible in order to keep the listener guessing at every turn. “One thing that I didn’t think about on purpose while doing this record was even thinking about what would be a single,” Courtney says, revealing an insight into their creative process on choosing what songs would be unveiled ahead of the album’s release. “Most people might think of that as a bad thing. But there’s not any song on the record that I’m like ‘this is the single, it has to be the single’. It’s always what I’m feeling at the time and what parameters we’re working within to be able to create a music video, because I care so much about the visual and the music to just connect. We kind of just go off of what’s compelling to us at the time for singles. I was so confused of what to put out as a single because, you know, in this genre your single is such a huge statement about what the entire record is going to sound like.”
Over the course of our conversation with Courtney, the authenticity in her voice and belief in her band is as clear as day. Every word is said with the utmost conviction, reinforcing just how much LaPlante has poured into this project. And after grinding in the scene for years and years, there is a real sense of respect for what Courtney and her bandmates are striving to achieve with SPIRITBOX, something in which makes them all the more appealing for heavy music fans, who take authenticity with the utmost seriousness. “I think that’s a shift. Like the pendulum is swinging back in this genre of music,” she says, providing an insight into the authenticity of the heavy music scene at large. “I think it really swung to everyone like chasing something that doesn’t actually even exist for this type of music. It seemed like there was a lot of bands, the actual band members or the people in charge of orchestrating everything, it was very much about the most profitable thing or being the most popular thing and then everyone else started doing that. I find it so weird. To invest all this time and money into music, but for some reason, someone tricked you into choosing the most unviable, broke ass genre that you could possibly pick! I feel like we got a little bit like boy-bandy for a bit with metalcore like 10 years ago. And now it’s really swinging back into just like exploring the boundaries a little more which is why I think a lot of people were so drawn to the nu-metal-esque wave of the late 90s and early 2000s. I feel like we’re kind of swinging back into that where it just feels more authentic and more farm to table.”
Flash-forward to the here and now and SPIRITBOX are poised to become the breakout name in heavy music this year. Every single release has been building to Eternal Blue, arguably one of this year’s most anticipated records. Courtney explains that whilst Eternal Blue is the culmination for the SPIRITBOX journey so far, for her, it is the culmination of everything she has ever done. “I want to prove to myself that I can succeed, and there’s no excuses. Every excuse I’ve ever gone to tell myself to why something didn’t reach my goals is gone. I have no one to blame, but myself if people don’t like this. Michael [Stringer, guitars] and I always say this, right now most of the songs are still my songs, like they’re mine, I own them. No one has heard them and what I think about them is all that matters. And then on September 17th, they become your songs, they’re not mine anymore. I just want this album to just prove to myself that that’s okay and everything that I’ve done in my life, every mistake I’ve made and everything I’ve done right has all led up to September 17th.”
Eternal Blue is out now via Rise Records.
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