Spiritbox Is Heavy Music’s Covid-Era Triumph

The pandemic has easily changed the inner workings of the music industry, particularly when it comes to launching a new band. For almost two years now, bands and artists alike haven’t been able to properly reestablish the album-tour cycle, as shows and release schedules have been thrown off course time and time again. However, in the case of the Canadian metal outfit Spiritbox, there’s been a new awakening both sonically and marketing wise in the rock industry. At a point where they’d not played more than ten shows as a band, Spiritbox’s debut record Eternal Blue charted at No. 13 on The Billboard Top 200 this year. For any rock band, more so metal band, charting this high with a debut is quite literally unheard of, especially in today’s music climate. Taking it even one step, the band hadn’t properly toured at all in anticipation for this release. That being said, there’s far more to Spiritbox than meets the eye, specifically in their marketing strategies and sonic appeal, which have both helped to establish them as this year’s most exciting new band.

For some time now, many bands in the heavy music community seemed to have lost the art of creating a brand, and more importantly a demand for their brand. In a way to differentiate themself and also inspire a demand, at the start of 2020 Spiritbox began to slowly drip out singles, all while the world was shutdown and concerts were an alien concept. By doing so the band took to the internet by storm and have since raked in tens of millions of views on youtube alone. Showcasing a tightly intertwined visual and sonic package was one of the key elements in building this momentum, but the music simply spoke for itself.

The band’s founding members guitarist Mike Stringer and vocalist Courtney LaPlante (who are also a married couple) have seemingly crafted an organic modern metal sound, one that can speaks to corners of both heavy and popular music genres. That in of itself is a feat few metal bands have managed to do, let alone at the start of their career. Now with over 120,867,793 streams under their belt, 2022 will be the start of the band’s next and very important phase, full force touring.

After speaking with both Courtney and Mike, as well as their longtime manager Jason Mageau, the band has shared their thoughts on their road to success, and how they’re gearing up for the another ambitious year in 2022.

What’s the experience been like for you all finally getting to play shows this year?

MS: It’s been very jarring. We entered the pandemic a completely different band, and obviously it’s still going on, but at the end of it we’re coming out on a different playing field. We’ve gone from opening shows that have 500 people in them for the first tour that we did, to now playing these festivals at pretty high up spots. It’s just been a whirlwind in the last couple of years with everything happening, so I guess jarring is the best way to put it because you kind of get thrown into it all. 

CL: I don’t mean to speak for everyone but for me at least, my confidence is like ‘fake.’ It’s like fake it to you make it, I have to protect myself and have this confidence that I haven’t established organically yet by slowly building up. Normally we would’ve had a normal trajectory had the world not shut down, but I’m trying to learn confidence as quickly as I can. The downside is we’re pretty intimidated when we walk out there sometimes, the upside is that because we’re getting all of these opportunities we’re getting to play with all of these amazing legendary bands. We have the opportunity to study their process and see that first hand, so it’s a double edged sword. It’s really intimidating but we’re also getting to see and learn from other people we look up to as well.

One thing very striking about Spiritbox is the fact you didn’t get that normal trajectory, specifically with the typical album-tour cycle. Instead you all focused on marketing your singles. Were longterm single releases the original plan for the band, or did that plan take shape because of the pandemic?

MS: I definitely say that it was with the pandemic, because initially we had that strategy with the singles collection which was the five songs that we spread out. The plan was to do one music video a month which obviously got dragged out because that’s so hard to do. 

CL: We’re so dumb for thinking that we could have made our own music videos and pay for them, and then make one once a month [laughs]. 

MS: It took like nine to ten months to have the whole thing go through, but during that time of releasing music we started writing for Eternal Blue. It took us about a year and a half to get it fully complete, and as that was happening the pandemic hit and we didn’t want to lose momentum. The first single that came about was “Holy Roller.” To us it was just kind of a palate cleanser on the record, and it was something that we could put out with a visual to keep the name going. All of a sudden that’s kind of when momentum really started kicking in. 

CL: We just put that out because we were really pissed off. We were finally on our first tour that we had ever gotten to do and that got canceled half way through, so we had to come back from Europe with our tail between our legs and cancel recording Eternal Blue, which we were going to do in April 2020. We were just mad, so we recorded “Holy Roller” because we had played it on tour a couple times and it was fun, and we felt comfortable recording it remotely with our producer Dan [Braunstein]. It’s easy to revise those things and go “oh yeah that was all part of the plan,” but from my perspective it was just simply…this whole Eternal Blue album roll out has been me reacting to outside events.

MS: We had to cancel recording the record about four or five times, so we put out “Holy Roller” in the summer of 2020 and we had Airbnbs booked constantly that we had to keep canceling, and all of us didn’t get in a room until February 2021. We had to do it that way because of the travel restrictions. 

JM: “Holy Roller” was released in advanced because the pandemic was a thing and we we didn’t want to slow down, and we were like “what do we do?” [Courtney and Mike] were already isolated on an island, so the pandemic wasn’t really this scary thing. A lot of agents and managers in the touring world have the ability to put a baby band on an opening spot, but when you take all of that away there’s real strategy that has to be done rather then slapping something on a tour and hoping you make fans off of the headliner’s fanbase. So once that was gone, the playing field leveled out. All of the noise and smoke and mirror bands disappeared, and we were able to really use the fanbase that we had made over three and half years at that point. Once we knew we were going to release “Holy Roller” it just exploded on the internet and everyone was like “what the f**k is this?” It was a really interesting moment because while a lot of people were struggling to figure out what to do, in a weird way we were used to already being in this isolated type of environment. They live on an island, they don’t have a bunch of cool friends in bands, they were already so on the outside.

Obviously that was a very unique and unfortunate circumstance, but what are you envisioning for future release plans for the band?

CL: I really want to make a goal of never thinking about an album as a contractual obligation that I’m simply fulfilling, and that’s what an album is. That’s why people put out ten songs, because they’re contractually obligated to do that so that they can get money from their label for it. I would prefer to just keep things as they are, where we just drip things out when we feel like it resonates with us and if it fits our mood at the time, and then when there seems to be a demand for it. I feel like a lot of records are supply with no demand, and I really admire the way that other genres of music do it. It seems like it’s so much more in the artist’s control, and it’s more organic with what the artist is controlling with when and where they drop their music. We look to the other genres for that as well, while still really respecting and appreciating how important an album is to the people that listen to our type of music. It’s important for us too, as listeners for the metal bands that we consume.

JM: If Eternal Blue would have just come out with one music video and we’d been like “pre-order our record!” there’d be no one there. It would be like throwing it down an empty hallway, no one would be listening. Pop and and hip-hop for example, they do the mixtape game and they live and die by the single. They’ll promote a single for like six months. Obviously there’s more avenues to place that single than there is in metal, like radio and all of that stuff, but I just sort of looked at them as they’ve been doing it forever. It’s not a revolutionary idea, you can drip feed songs over time and then package that into an EP when you’re done with five songs, which is what we did with the self-titled and singles collection. 

Why is it do you think the heavy music genre has somewhat refrained from the longterm single release format, and instead stuck with very cyclical album releases? 

CL: Well selfishly, releasing singles and just having all of your eggs in one basket for everything, that’s really hard sometimes. How do you pick where and when? A lot of artists in our genre are just workhorses, they’re not only creating new music but they’re just ‘go go go’ on tour, nonstop just absolutely punishing tours. So where do you have time to then shoot music videos and slowly create music? That’s really hard. We’ve had that taken away, that dynamic of our band. So all we’ve had to do is sit around and be like “what cool thing can we create?” We haven’t had the physical aspect, so personally I’m not sure why but I think that our genre, hard-rock and metal, it seems like the demographic of the really popular stuff is a lot of older people with disposable incomes who like consuming one body of work that’s a collection. So I’m not too sure why, but I think it’s just our demographic, they love that and they love supporting the artists. And that’s the way you support an artist, by buying their album and buying merch. 

MS: It is a risk too, and I feel like especially in metal the whole thing about it is that artists will want to write a full concept record, or a you’ll find that more in metal than in hip-hop or pop. It is risky because you could put out a single that no one checks out and then you’re kind of just like “well, I would have had a better shot if I would have put out 12 of these songs at the same time,” maybe that’s the mentality. This day and age with the internet and YouTube and everything, the more visual content and the more content in general that you put out it’s just more eyes on you. I don’t know, I think metal is slowly starting to wake up to that a little bit, but I think it’s just a risk factor in my opinion. 

CL: And it started as a need. We didn’t record an album for so long because simply how would we afford to do that? We’re not going to spend a thousand bucks on ten songs and have them sound like absolute s**t, we want it to be of quality so we’ve spent our money on a smaller quantity of songs. Now we’re at a position where we can afford to record a full body of work and afford physical copies of that stuff. We don’t have some masterplan, it’s us reacting to what can we do to the best of our ability, and for the last four years it’s been hyper focusing on a small body of work and making them to the best of our ability. And yeah, sometimes Michael shoots a video on his iPhone and uses a version of Final Cut Pro that keeps expiring if he accidentally changes the date, because the trial is done. Yeah we’ve done that, and we recorded Eternal Blue in a kitchen with Dan, I mean obviously we were with an amazing producer and all of his awesome equipment, but you know you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. It’s less pressure for me to just think of something as a collective of work, because I think it’s hard for a lot of artists to figure out what to put out and what represents them. Each thing you put out feels like ‘this defines you,’ and now ‘this is who you are,’ and ‘this is who you are until you put out another song.’ I don’t think there’s a wrong way to do it. 

I mean for Spiritbox you’ve taken significant risks with your singles and the risks seemed to have really payed off. What was it like seeing how well your debut did when it released?

CL: I don’t know, I thought someone was pranking us to be honest.

MS: I thought Ashton Kutcher was going to come out and tell us we got ‘punk’d.’ I said this before but in my mind I was like “man, if we can get into the Top 100 or just anywhere on there I’d be so so excited,” and then when it landed where it did I was just in complete disbelief to be honest. You work on something for so long and then you forget what the closing date is. You put it out and of course when it finally goes on Spotify you’re like “okay, finally it’s out and I don’t have to worry about this thing that’s been on my phone for two years.” But to have those charts come in and solidify that this is how it did…it still doesn’t feel real to me 100%. 

CL: Our band’s age is young but we’re not young. We’ve been doing this and trying to not just do well in the music industry, but to be like an actual part of the music industry for our whole lives. It’s been 14 years of us trying to do this stuff, so it’s just one of those things that’s never been important to us before, because it didn’t seem within reach. So it’s wild to be acknowledged in that way because it’s amongst other artists that we respect so much. I always say, however briefly, the screenshot of your chart placement on that day lasts forever, so it’s really motivating for our own selves, but I think we feel that way any time any heavy band breaks into that percentile. It’s motivating, even if it’s a band that I don’t even like, it makes me so inspired and really motivated because it helps all of us. 

It’s been fascinating to see the success you’ve had from this year just build and build, and I’m sure it’s likely created a lot of pressure as well. With the year wrapping up now, how are you all looking towards future?

MS: Well we have a lot to prove, and in my opinion it’s looking like us at every given moment that we can, we’re getting in a room and honing in on the live show. Like I said before, of course we’re so ecstatic and appreciative of all the opportunities this year to play live, but as you say it’s a little stressful and it’s hard to go from not ever playing a show that big, to now doing a bunch in the span of a few months and having to get the gear and get everything ready. So now that we’re over this hump and we’ve gone through all that, 2022 is basically just going to be us honing in and making sure that everything is perfect. We’ve seen other bands get this type of opportunity, and we fully recognize that this moment could be taken away, 

CL: But it would be our doing, to be taking it away. It would be by our own hand.

MS: Exactly so it’s very important for us that when we do play it’s memorable and that people walk away from it satisfied. So it’s going to be a lot of touring and it’s going to be writing on the side. 

CL: We don’t want to stop writing, that’s what we’re doing right now actually. Michael and I are in LA because we have a brief moment of time and we don’t want to make the sophomore slump mistake that a lot of people make. When something takes off some bands just ‘tour tour tour,’ and then they don’t have anything left for writing. Then when a record’s due they’re like “well, let’s write a record, I guess.” We don’t want to fall into those traps.