Spiritbox singer Courtney LaPlante’s steady rise towards becoming one of heavy music’s premier voices has been a thing of beastly beauty.
From getting her start in Vancouver Island’s late Aughts metalcore scene, to making the jump to the Vans Warped Tour while fronting iwrestledabearonce, to headlining arenas and nabbing Grammy nominations for her staggeringly dynamic work with Spiritbox, LaPlante has proved herself a force of nature to be reckoned with. And her voice is seemingly only getting stronger by the day.
Over the years, LaPlante’s vocals have thrilled many through energetic live shows and jaw-dropping one-take YouTube vids. She’s inspired the next generation of metalcore vocalists, while also gracefully sharing stages and mic time with some of the world’s biggest players in metal, hip-hop and more.
But what is the one true Courtney LaPlante performance to rule them all? We asked Revolver readers to weigh in on their favorites, and these were the top five vote-getters.
“Jaded”
“Jaded” was a colossal game-changer for Spiritbox, with the second single from the group’s The Fear of Fear EP nabbing them their first-ever Grammy nomination (which, obviously, wouldn’t be their last).
And while it’s a breakthrough on a credential level, the 2023 single also reinforces something fans had already known about LaPlante for ages — specifically, she’s a goddamned juggernaut on the mic. “Jaded” plays to extremes, with LaPlante honing a lilting, soft-vibrato vulnerability amid the early djenting of the song, but she later obliterates the “silence underneath” with an elbows-up scream sesh.
You’d have to be pretty jaded to not appreciate her versatile, all-star performance on this one.
“Rule of Nines”
“Rule of Nines,” how do we love thee — lets us count the ways.
This standalone single from 2019 balances low-kaboomed metalcore aesthetics with an infectiously full-on tapping clinic from guitarist Mike Stringer, but another key part to the success of “Rule of Nines” is the way LaPlante stacks her vocals throughout.
There’s a sublime eeriness in how her clean vocal entwines with a cotton-mouthed, pitchshifted shadow in the verse, though the chorus goes into harmonic overdrive with Prince-level stacks of “ahhs.” And then, of course, LaPlante also summons the beast with a mid-song growl.
Per the lyrics, the singer was feeling her insides breaking down, but damned if her vocals didn’t build this Spiritbox single into a towering monolith.
“Blessed Be”
“Serotonin like a loaded gun.”
Honestly, this line LaPlante delivers within 2019’s nu-grooving “Blessed Be” could be seen as a mission statement of sorts for Spiritbox.
Like many tracks in their catalog, it delivers big and brawny yet hooks-driven riffage, massively quaking drum work and the tandem cleans-to-screams attack LaPlante perfected super early on in the band’s career.
With “Blessed Be,” they continue to slam hard and heavy into your dome, but it feels so good.
“Rotoscope”
“Rotoscope” roils with an industrial-bruised framework of lunging electronics, string-scraped percussive savagery and factory-fresh four-on-the-floors. It was a different vibe for Spiritbox at the time, but LaPlante navigated the 2022 single with suave-and-screamed adventurousness.
She gets extra breathy at the top of the cut, but also soars through moments of darkly melodic panache and brings in some extra-lengthy howls in the backend.
The song apparently left a rapturous imprint on the brains of Spiritbox fans, and it remains a “violent delight” in their catalog to this day.
“Circle With Me”
“Circle With Me” was one of the many instant-classics found on Spiritbox’s god-tier debut album, Eternal Blue. But going by the positive feedback in our polling, what fans really dug was the iconic, one-take video LaPlante uploaded onto YouTube a couple of months after the album’s release.
Truly, you feel the emotional weight of every syllable — from the close-mic intimacy of the verses, to the cloud-vaulting highs of the chorus, to the on-the-dime pivoting she does between graceful cleans and all-fury screams in its dynamic finale.
It’s a masterclass performance that perfectly captures the magnetic back-and-forth approach LaPlante harnesses on the mic. Simply stunning.