Rating: 9.5 / 10 Stars
SPIRITBOX is: Courtney LaPlante (Vocals), Mike Stringer (Guitars), Bill Crook (Bass), and Zev Rose (Drums)
REVIEW – There is a particular kind of anticipation that only happens when a band has already become unavoidable before releasing a debut album. SPIRITBOX are standing in that rare and dangerous space with Eternal Blue, set to arrive September 17, 2021 through Pale Chord Records in partnership with Rise Records. The Canadian heavy music outfit have spent the last several years building not just momentum, but mythology: one single at a time, one immaculate shift between beauty and devastation at a time, one online eruption at a time. Now, with Eternal Blue, they are preparing to turn that slow-burn ascent into a full-length statement.
What makes Spiritbox so compelling before this album even fully opens itself is that they do not feel like a band chasing a scene. They feel like a band quietly redesigning the room around them. Metalcore, progressive metal, djent, alternative metal, electronic atmosphere, ambient melancholy, and pop-conscious melody all move through their sound, but none of those tags fully contain what Courtney LaPlante, Mike Stringer, Bill Crook, and Zev Rose are building. Spiritbox are heavy, absolutely, but their heaviness is not limited to impact. It is emotional temperature. It is negative space. It is the feeling of a scream being held underwater until the surface finally breaks.
The opening track “Sun Killer” feels positioned as a doorway rather than a detonation. Spiritbox understand atmosphere with unusual patience, and this opener seems designed to pull the listener into the album’s pressure system before the full violence arrives. Courtney LaPlante’s voice has become one of modern metal’s most fascinating instruments because it can feel spectral and intimate one moment, then monstrous the next. She does not simply switch between clean singing and screaming as a technical exercise. She changes the temperature of the room. On “Sun Killer,” that duality appears ready to establish the album’s central language: light and destruction, beauty and collapse, control and surrender.
“Hurt You” carries one of the album’s most direct emotional wounds. Spiritbox have always been effective at making personal damage feel architectural, and this track seems built around the terrible intimacy of harm inside connection. The title is blunt, almost conversational, but that bluntness is part of its force. It suggests the kind of pain that no longer needs metaphor because the truth is already sharp enough. Musically, the song’s tension between melodic atmosphere and crushing weight captures what Spiritbox do best: they make the breakdown feel like an emotional consequence rather than a mandatory genre checkpoint.
Then comes “Yellowjacket,” featuring Sam Carter of Architects, a collaboration that makes sense not because Spiritbox need outside validation, but because Carter’s presence fits the track’s likely sense of panic, bite, and forward motion. The title evokes swarm behavior, agitation, and venom, and Spiritbox seem primed to turn that imagery into something claustrophobic and electric. Carter’s voice has long carried the sound of controlled desperation, and paired with LaPlante’s range, “Yellowjacket” promises one of the record’s most combustible moments.
“The Summit” suggests elevation, but Spiritbox rarely treat ascension as simple triumph. With this band, climbing often means exposure. The higher you go, the thinner the air becomes. The song appears to offer one of the album’s more spacious and melodic statements, the kind of track where the band’s ambient and progressive instincts can breathe without losing emotional gravity. Mike Stringer’s guitar work has always been crucial to this balance. His playing is not merely riff-driven; it is textural, percussive, spectral, and precise. He can make a guitar sound like machinery, weather, glass, or a collapsing wall.
“Secret Garden” may be one of the most important pieces in Spiritbox’s ascent. Already unveiled before the album, it shows the band at their most lush and accessible without feeling compromised. The song glows, but not softly. It is beautiful in a way that feels guarded, like something blooming in a place where nothing should be able to survive. That is the genius of Spiritbox’s melodic writing. They are not adding prettiness to heaviness. They are showing that beauty can be its own form of tension. “Secret Garden” feels like the moment where the band’s atmospheric instincts and massive hook-writing potential fully meet.
“Silk in the Strings” sounds, even by title, like contradiction: softness pulled across tension, delicacy caught in something wound tight enough to snap. Spiritbox thrive in that sort of imagery. Their songs often feel like they are made from opposing materials: velvet and steel, breath and blast, shimmer and impact. This track seems likely to lean into the band’s more technical and aggressive side, but the title suggests that even the violence will come threaded with elegance.
“Holy Roller” has already become a defining statement for Spiritbox, and its inclusion here gives Eternal Blue a moment of pure, ritualized destruction. The song’s rise has been impossible to ignore, bringing the band a level of heavy-music attention that few debut-album acts experience before the record is even out. It is minimal, punishing, hypnotic, and almost liturgical in its repetition. Courtney LaPlante’s performance on “Holy Roller” is not just heavy; it is commanding in a way that feels possessed by intent. The track proves that Spiritbox can be brutally direct without becoming ordinary.
But Eternal Blue does not appear interested in living only in that extreme lane. “Eternal Blue,” the title track, suggests the album’s emotional and aesthetic core. The phrase itself is vast and mournful, implying depth, permanence, distance, and immersion. Blue can be serenity, sadness, sky, ocean, bruising, coldness, infinity. Spiritbox’s entire sound seems to live inside that range of meanings. The title track is poised to be less a single statement than a thesis: heaviness as emotional immersion, melody as undertow, atmosphere as pressure.
“We Live in a Strange World” carries a phrase that feels almost too simple until you sit with it. The world Spiritbox are releasing this album into is fractured, online, isolated, overstimulated, wounded, and hungry for connection it often cannot sustain. This song title suggests alienation without theatricality. It sounds like something said quietly after the noise stops. Spiritbox have the ability to make that quiet feel enormous, and a song like this could become one of the album’s most quietly unsettling turns.
“Halcyon” introduces another word associated with calm, memory, and idealized peace, but again, Spiritbox are not a band to be trusted with peace in the simple sense. The title implies longing for stillness, perhaps even nostalgia for a state of being that never truly existed. In the context of Eternal Blue, “Halcyon” may serve as one of the album’s more reflective passages, a song that lets the listener float just long enough to realize the water is deeper than expected.
“Circle With Me” is another crucial pre-release marker, and perhaps the clearest example of Spiritbox’s ability to unify accessibility and aggression without either side feeling diluted. The song has the architecture of an anthem but the soul of a rupture. Its clean vocal lines are luminous, its heavier sections hit with precision, and the transition between them feels inevitable rather than stitched together. “Circle With Me” shows a band capable of writing songs that can reach far beyond metal’s usual borders while still satisfying the listener who came for impact.
The closing track “Constance” is already understood as one of Spiritbox’s most emotionally devastating pieces. Dedicated in connection with grief, memory, and dementia, the song moves differently from the band’s more explosive material. It is soft, haunted, and deeply human, proving that Spiritbox do not need volume to be crushing. In many ways, ending Eternal Blue with “Constance” feels like the boldest possible decision. After all the technicality, atmosphere, violence, and momentum, the album appears ready to leave the listener not with a final breakdown, but with absence. With memory. With love that has nowhere left to go.
What separates Spiritbox from so much of the modern heavy landscape is their understanding of restraint. They know when not to fill the room. They know when a single vocal line can do more damage than another layer of guitars. They know when the heaviest thing in a song is not the riff, but the silence before it. That sense of composition is what makes Eternal Blue feel less like a debut collection and more like a fully realized arrival.
Courtney LaPlante’s presence is central, but Spiritbox are not a one-dimensional vehicle for vocal acrobatics. Mike Stringer’s production-minded guitar language gives the band much of its identity: low-tuned precision, ambient detail, rhythmic intelligence, and a sense of space that keeps even the densest moments from becoming muddy. Bill Crook’s bass work provides weight and movement beneath the atmosphere, while Zev Rose’s drumming gives the songs a physical core, anchoring the band’s more ethereal instincts in something muscular and alive.
There is also a fascinating emotional intelligence at work here. Spiritbox do not write darkness like decoration. Their songs often feel like attempts to describe internal states that resist ordinary language: dissociation, grief, devotion, shame, memory, spiritual exhaustion, and the strange calm that sometimes follows panic. Eternal Blue appears ready to gather those states into one immersive body of work.
For fans of modern progressive metalcore, Eternal Blue is likely to be a landmark release. But limiting it to that audience feels too small. Spiritbox have the rare ability to appeal to listeners who want technical heaviness, atmospheric depth, huge melodic architecture, and emotional vulnerability without asking any one of those elements to dominate the others. They are not softening heavy music. They are expanding where heaviness can live.
The title Eternal Blue feels more appropriate the closer one gets to the album’s arrival. It suggests something vast, submerged, and unending. That is exactly where Spiritbox seem to operate: beneath the surface, where beauty and terror share the same pressure, where melody can feel like drowning, where a scream can feel like release, where the water is cold but strangely inviting.
With Eternal Blue, Spiritbox are poised to deliver one of the most important debut albums in modern heavy music: elegant, brutal, immersive, wounded, and frighteningly assured. This is not merely a band fulfilling the promise of its singles. It is a band proving that the promise was only the beginning.
For more information on SPIRITBOX, visit:
www.Spiritbox.com
www.Facebook.com/SpiritboxOfficial
www.X.com/SpiritboxBand
www.Instagram.com/SpiritboxMusic
www.YouTube.com/@SpiritboxOfficial
www.Spotify.com/Artist/Spiritbox
