It’s January when we meet Courtney LaPlante in Los Angeles, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. The air is thick. It’s difficult to breathe.
Her Canadian progressive metalcore outfit, Spiritbox, stand at the threshold of what may be their most transformative year yet — and just days ago, wildfires tore through much of the singer’s adopted hometown. The L.A. sky is burnt orange. Families remain in evacuation shelters.
“I think this fire’s changed everyone,” says LaPlante.
The night the blaze started, Mike Stringer — LaPlante’s husband and Spiritbox’s guitarist — was out of town. The vocalist was alone when she was forced to evacuate their home, which, thankfully, was left untouched. Their bassist, Josh Gilbert, wasn’t so lucky. His house burned to the ground — wedding photos, documents and a lifetime of memorabilia, all reduced to ash.
The destruction forced him to adopt an almost Buddhist mindset. Letting go of all his worldly possessions helped the bassist find an unexpected sense of peace. He turned his back on what was gone and focused on what remained: Spiritbox.
The band has been at the forefront of modern metal since their 2021 breakout debut Eternal Blue. They’ve received two Grammy nominations, dominated the festival circuit and collab’d onstage and on record with a who’s who of modern tastemakers: from Poppy and Architects to Tati from Jinjer, Chelsea Wolfe and Megan Thee Stallion. But now Spiritbox are just a few nudges away from some-thing bigger — the highest league. This year could be their breakthrough moment. In February, they embark on their largest headlining tour yet. In March, they’ll release their second album, Tsunami Sea — a record so unmistakably classic that it’s bound to cement Spiritbox’s place in the metal canon.
Spiritbox have been preparing for this moment for some time. And as soon as the clock struck 2025, they got to work fine-tuning every last detail. They zoomed in on every single pixel that would be projected on the massive tour screens in their live show. They worked with stylists to perfect every thread of their Grammy outfits. They planned their press run, strategizing how to talk about the best work of their career. They steeled their mindsets and toughened up before taking on the world.
Then came the inferno. And the doubt.
LaPlante was prepared to cancel all of it — the tour, the album, the promotional activity, Spiritbox’s true breakout year. But no one, it seems, was more determined to push forward than Gilbert. Witnessing the bassist’s single-mindedness in the wake of his loss inspired the band to double down. Their commitment to Tsunami Sea became even more urgent.
“If Josh weren’t so focused on the band, we wouldn’t be able to do this,” says LaPlante. “I’m so grateful that we’re still able to do this, because we almost weren’t going to.”
Spiritbox’s leader sounds more tenacious than ever, and it soon becomes clear that we’re speaking to a changed LaPlante — one not only altered by the fires but by her own self-determination.
“It’s really important this year that all of us grow our confidence,” she says, twiddling the ends of her hair — a shade of burnt-caramel ombré. Her Bernedoodle named ’Ghetti (“her Christian name is Spaghetti”) barks in the background, the dog’s dark fur and tawny trimming mirroring LaPlante’s own hairstyle.
You can already hear that growing confidence in LaPlante’s voice. She remains congenial — but now with an added bite. It’s a version of herself that she’s yet to showcase in her earlier press appearances for Tsunami Sea. We saw a much milder and more filtered LaPlante during Spiritbox’s high-profile interview with podcaster Zach Sang in late December. But here, there’s no bullshit.
Alex Bemis
This time, she stops herself from repeating the same old media-trained phrases. There’s no deferential, we’ll-see-what-happens statements when it comes to talk of the upcoming 67th Grammy Awards, where Spiritbox’s “Cellar Door” (from 2023’s The Fear of Fear EP) is nominated for Best Metal Performance. Instead, LaPlante declares: “Gojira’s gonna win. I’m not saying this in a self-deprecating way. They deserve to win.”
Turns out, she was right — a few weeks after our interview, Gojira took home the award. Even so, this is the kind of self-defeating attitude that’s she’s trying to train out of her system.
See, LaPlante is keen to diminish her reputation as one of metal’s most humble and down-to-earth personalities. She’s determined to retool her own universe, to shed her impostor syndrome.
“Of course we haven’t written an acceptance speech,” she continues. “Like I said, Gojira’s obviously gonna win.” She catches herself. “But I shouldn’t be saying that.”
LaPlante, like most people, is a work in progress. She’s not trying to be an asshole or a stereotypical entitled rock star — she’s just learning to stop under-cutting herself. “Right now, I’m like, ‘Someone must have bribed the voters into nominating us for another Grammy,’” she says. “But I don’t wanna be like that anymore. I want to have the security and confidence to be like, ‘Yeah, I fucking deserve this.’”
And on Grammy night, we see that newfound confidence in action. When a red-carpet interviewer mistakes her for Poppy, LaPlante briefly scowls before playfully turning the moment around on the oblivious interviewer. “I am Poppy, and I am really happy to be here nominated with Knocked Loose,” she jokes.
This is the new LaPlante. No more falling back on self-denigration as a coping mechanism. No more caving to other people’s bullshit. No more showing up as anything other than her most calcified, self-assured self. LaPlante is slowly transforming into the spokesperson Tsunami Sea deserves.
In the studio, the singer routinely maxes out limiters with the sheer velocity of her voice. Now she’s matching that energy in her day-to-day life. “We were just a small new band when we released our last album,” she says of Eternal Blue. “We recorded it in a kitchen. We had so much going against us. Now there’s no excuse.”
While self-doubt plagued LaPlante during Eternal Blue’s rollout — exacerbated by the press overstating the “breakdowns” she experienced while making the album — its ensuing success was undeniable. The record earned Spiritbox wide-spread critical and commercial acclaim, along with high-profile tours supporting Ghost, Underoath and more. This album cycle is different because LaPlante is different. Those experiences and achievements have strengthened her confidence. Today, she knows exactly how good Tsunami Sea is, and she’s not afraid to say it.
Bolstered by a grand mythology and world-building that puts it on par with modern classics like Gojira’s Magma or Architects’ Holy Hell, Tsunami Sea feels like a rough journey from river mouth to sea, each harmonic stroke of LaPlante’s voice an ebb warring against the flow of the band’s cauterizing instrumentation.
The album weaves in shades of shoegaze alongside the group’s signature djent and metalcore assaults. You can hear some of the early Spiritbox staples, too: half-time riffs, an acute attention to atmosphere and the subconscious, with field recordings buried in the mix.
Even the album’s artwork nods to their roots, cast in the same monochromatic palette as their 2017 self-titled debut EP. “We wanted it all in black and white because we’re reflecting on where we’ve come from as well as how much we’ve grown,” says LaPlante.
Jonathan Weiner
In the eight years since that EP, Spiritbox have matured enough to redefine metal on their own terms. Now, they’re trying to commit hard-rock regicide.
Historically, metal has often been a vehicle for expressing an artist’s darkest, most antisocial and antiheroic impulses — their self-loathing, and sometimes even their willingness to harm themselves. Spiritbox are taking a different tack with Tsunami Sea and pushing back against what LaPlante describes as the “demons in my head, I’m a piece of shit” brand of metal. The songs have all the venom and emotional intensity that the genre requires, but Spiritbox’s anger isn’t rooted in self-hate. It’s aimed at the bullies who mistreat others and spread toxicity within the scene.
Last September, the band released “Soft Spine,” which targeted some of the worst offenders: “I hate the ones that love you/And those who profit from you/It’s time to reap the tide you sow,” LaPlante screams on Spiritbox’s most blistering track yet. That song started as a fantasy — albeit a revenge one.
“I was thinking of all these assholes who are so beloved in our genre, and I wanted to whoop their ass, like they were the school bullies,” she says. “I’m always so shocked by how gnarly and disgusting the people in our world can be, but it’s like none of us are famous enough for the world outside to give a fuck.”
While LaPlante refuses to give these oppressors more power by naming them directly, during the three-minute run time of “Soft Spine” she gets to live out her fantasy. “When I perform that song, I get to say what I want to them without saying their name and elevating them on the public stage.”
It’s clear that Spiritbox have one of the strongest spines in metal, each of its members almost unwavering in their commitment to their morals and beliefs. Still, LaPlante is human — and navigating the complexities and compromises that come with that. She’s extremely resistant to being labeled an activist or ethically virtuous in any way. And she’s still grappling with how much distance Spiritbox should keep from the seemingly unavoidable “assholes” in the industry.
“Everyone has this moment where they’re offered an amount of money by someone who works with someone else who they know is bad,” she says, “and it makes you question where your morals actually lie and how many degrees of separation is OK.”
Alex Bemis
Spiritbox still share festival stages with some of metal’s bad characters year in, year out. Recently, she’s watched the genre tilt toward nationalism. “Why do I keep seeing these bands at festivals waving around the American flag and playing the national anthem during breakdowns? What the fuck is this weird patriotic commercialization and why are people being very loud about their un-educated opinions?”
It’s this pendulum shift that LaPlante has been contending with both on- and offstage, and has addressed directly in songs like “Soft Spine.” “On the surface, there’s this manufactured kind of authenticity, but behind the scenes, a lot of it is creatively bankrupt,” she says.
LaPlante recently came across a theory from a writer named Yasmine Summan who opined that since Christian fascists have become society’s outcasts — “because they’re fucking snowflakes that their families have become sick and tired of,” adds LaPlante — it is they who have since latched onto metal, the genre for outsiders. “It blew my mind and made sense of everything I’ve been trying to piece together,” she continues. “And it’s these fucking weirdos, who think they’re the outcasts, who are threatening people’s identities and existence.”
LaPlante then brings up the topic of being a “woman in metal” — a subject that’s been treated so tritely and incuriously that I hesitate to raise it myself. It’s the one part of the gig that still hasn’t changed. “I’m always fascinated by how I’m a minority in the scene, even though women make up at least half of the planet,” she says. “I don’t care what sound bites come out from this — people are gonna be offended by this for whatever bullshit reason, no matter what I say. But this is shit that actually affects me, it’s not some kind of victimhood mentality.
“I’m just talking about my experience, and for every person that might be angry about a woman speaking about her experience, there’s probably another who’s grateful for it. All I want to do is help people leave this insular, sexist world.”
It’s difficult to say where Courtney the singer ends and Courtney the person begins — the energies bleed into one another. One moment she’s calm, cool and seemingly indifferent — and then suddenly, like right now, she’s full of fire. Then she resets, steadily considering the year ahead. She takes a deep breath.