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Spiritbox: “Every time I walk out onstage, I can’t believe this is my life”
With a career already full to the brim of bucket-list moments, this weekend Spiritbox are taking things to a whole new level by opening for Linkin Park at a sold-out Wembley Stadium. As well as pondering “what Cellar Door sounds like when it’s blasted” to a whopping 90,000 people, Courtney LaPlante talks success, self-belief, and letting art speak for itself…
- Words:
- Sam Coare
- Cover photo:
- Jonathan Weiner
- Photos:
- Alex Bemis, Jenn Five, Jake Owens
Courtney LaPlante calls them her “blinders”. They don’t go on all the time. Certainly not at her own gigs, where Spiritbox’s name is up in lights above the door. There, she feels a comfort in the “community” of “my people, who are going to be welcoming me with open arms”. But at shows such as this one – Download 2025, Donington Park – Courtney keeps her blinders close at hand, ready to metaphorically block out the noise, the crowd and everything else that might distract, scare, overwhelm.
“You never know what you’re going to be walking into,” she begins. It’s why she purposely didn’t head to the festival’s Apex Stage much before Spiritbox’s allotted time, let alone afford herself much of a sneak-peek from behind the stage curtain.
“With shows like these, at a festival or in support of another band, I can’t presume that anyone there knows me,” she continues. “I can’t presume they will understand me, us, or what we’re trying to do.”
This isn’t unfamiliar territory for Courtney. In 2022, the blinders were out to try and put a lid on the nerves bubbling up about a six-song set that amounted to not only the band’s Download debut, but their first-ever foray into the United Kingdom.
“I was so freaked out by the hype surrounding us,” Courtney told this writer the following summer, of a fervour that had been building since Kerrang! declared Spiritbox “the hottest band in the world” a full six months before their debut album Eternal Blue. The lead-up to the festival had seen the band moved from the fourth stage to the third in order to cope with the anticipated demand. It’s since taken a mere 13 more performances on this island – ranging from Glasgow’s Barrowlands to London’s Roundhouse – to make the main stage jump.
Courtney is taking stock of the Download weekend gone by on a chilled-out morning following a late night “dancing my ass off” to Beyonce at north London’s Tottenham Hotspur stadium (“It was so awesome – she flew a car right over our heads!”). Processing the experience has been helped by the proliferation Insta Reels and TikToks of their performance, which Courtney has spent time absorbing. “It feels so much bigger watching it back than it did at the time,” she admits. “It’s just so hard to conceive that there are so many people in front of you. It’s like my brain can’t process it.”
This was no trick of the mind, however. Headliners Green Day, Sleep Token and Korn may well have ended up the talk of the festival as tents were packed down and cars loaded back up for another year, but not a soul gathered in Spiritbox’s swelling crowd on Sunday afternoon left thinking anything other than something very special had occurred. “A clear statement of intent from a band primed to take things to the next level,” we said of the stand-out set.
“It’s funny because back in 2022, Korn were playing on the main stage. It was the first time we met them, and they’re such sweethearts, and when we ran into them backstage after our show they invited us to walk up with them and watch them from the side of the stage,” Courtney remembers. “Three years later, we were doing that exact same walk up the stage with them – only it was for them to be watching us! And they were headlining that night. It’s the sort of crazy thing that makes you think that yeah, next time we do that walk, maybe it’ll be dark outside…”
It’s no wonder Courtney feels like “time moves in an interesting way”. Or that her band feel both simultaneously new and something that has been a fixture of her and husband Michael Stringer’s life for almost a decade (the couple themselves can count 13 years together). Formed in 2016 and exploding in 2021, Spiritbox exist in the realm of being something that amounts to an overnight sensation a lifetime in the making. And 2025 is just another Biggest Year Ever for a band whose trajectory remains vertigo-inducing.
So you can excuse any discombobulation as Courtney attempts to comprehend her band’s journey to this moment – Download, GRAMMY nominations, critical acclaim and fan adoration, Wembley Stadium with Linkin Park this weekend – throughout her 90 minutes speaking with Kerrang!. You can understand when she admits that growth makes it “so hard to keep up with people’s expectations of you” when progress comes a mile a minute. Or how their post-pandemic rocket to the moon can make the required speed of decision-making feel “overwhelming”. Or that “receiving these incredible opportunities” is still so new that they amount not to having earned anything at all, but are merely “an opportunity to prove that we’ve earned it”.
You also know it to be true when Courtney says these are the greatest days of her life, the continuing fulfilment of ever-growing dreams.
Moreover, you believe her when she says: “I really do feel like this is only the beginning.”
“It’s so hard to conceive that there are so many people in front of you…”
This is not, of course, the beginning. For that, you need to rewind the clock to 2015, and… well, you know the story by now. The end of Mike and Courtney’s old band, the years of toil, the pandemic smash-hit Holy Roller single, Eternal Blue, selling out London’s Alexandra Palace, world domination. In fact, the history lesson can start many years earlier still, in 2004, when a 15-year-old Courtney LaPlante was uprooted from her Alabama home and deposited on Vancouver Island off Canada’s west coast, finding solace in a music scene that would put hers and Mike’s fates on a collision course.
Vancouver Island is a central character in Tsunami Sea, Spiritbox’s second album, released this past March, with the tidal water surrounding their hometown used as a metaphor for emotional and spiritual turmoil and the all-engulfing nature of mental health struggles; the ebb and flow of life. As a follow-up to Eternal Blue and The Fear Of Fear EP sandwiched between the two, it built upon longstanding themes of isolation, dread, depression and imposter syndrome. Rather than the intervening years’ successes eroding the existential crises at the core of Courtney’s open-hearted lyricism, Tsunami Sea seemed only to present an exasperation of them. On Eternal Blue’s title-track, Courtney sang how ‘agony starts to pull like a riptide’. Four years later, the vocalist’s emotions are now ocean-sized, turning ‘all my tears into a tsunami sea’.
Earlier this year, Courtney told Kerrang! of feeling “embarrassed” at having negative feelings as her career – her life – finally begins to resemble that which she’s always desired. Here’s everything you ever wanted… and you’re still not happy? A half-dozen years ago, she was waiting tables for the princely sum of $8 an hour. When Eternal Blue was released, both she and Michael were working in data entry to fund the band. And yet at Download, haunched at the top of the Apex Stage’s vanity ramp, framed against a piercing clear blue sky before tens of thousands of adoring fans, Courtney delivered a truly affecting rendition of Perfect Soul. ‘My dreams are just a fantasy,’ she sang. ‘And that is all they’ll ever be.’
“Those are very intimate feelings to be having in front of thousands of people,” Courtney says. “If you know me, and you’ve watched our journey, you can project the actual reality of what people know about my life into what I’m saying. But most people don’t know the real me. There’s a lot outside of [our experiences as a band] that those words are about, and unfortunately those feelings will always be relevant to me. It’s been a part of me for my whole life. I never really knew that there was a different experience that you could have with mental illness. For my whole life I just kind of slipped through the cracks, because I’m so good at not making it other people’s problem. It’s a cyclical thing, like the tide.”
Her dreams really are no longer a fantasy, however. Spiritbox have as many GRAMMY nominations to their name as they do full-length releases. Few ever get to visit Alexandra Palace, let alone sell it out months in advance. Collaborations with Megan Thee Stallion on record and onstage at Coachella have afforded Courtney a star status outside of the closed confines of the metalcore world (even if she is occasionally misidentified by red-carpet interviewers). Each experience is humbling, and confirmation of every step that has brought them here.
“Every single time I walk out onstage, I just cannot believe that this is my life,” she says. “That this is mine and Michael’s life, and we get to share in it together.”
If recent years have proven transformative for Spiritbox, they have also changed Courtney. Asked what about the journey has been the biggest lesson, she points to two things: trusting your intuition, and finding the balance between taking onboard people’s advice while also being focused enough on what you want.
“Next time I put music out, I’m just going to let it speak for itself,” she reasons. “You shouldn’t have to explain yourself, and maybe that means you’ve not done a good enough job of conveying what you intended in the music if you do. But what I’ve learned is that I feel a lot more comfortable showing my work, and not telling people about it. There’s a time and a place for that, but I think I can do that better. That’s definitely something I’ve learned.”
Back in the spring of 2021, when interviewed for their first Kerrang! cover – their first cover anywhere – Courtney discussed her love of a Vanity Fair video interview series with Billie Eilish, in which the magazine interviews the singer on the same day each year (the series is ongoing, having completed eight entries), the footage serving as a record of reflection, growth and change. Courtney joked then that K! should sit with her again in 12 months’ time to repeat our conversation – something we never did, but that we suggest we now put right.
So, does Courtney LaPlante of 2021 believe where she would be today?
“This whole thing is so weird, because sometimes I feel like, ‘Is this like a disguise?’” she begins. “Like, am I pretending to be shocked at where we are today? Because honestly, for my whole life I’ve just known that this is going to work out. All four of us have, even if we didn’t necessarily know it would be together. So, no, Courtney then would probably say she wouldn’t believe it, but deep down she’d have known. We have been so delusional forever. I think the self-doubt we project is almost a form of protection. Because yeah, I’ve always known I would be here.
“If I could go back and talk to me from four years ago, I would try to tell her to be more outwardly confident, because deep down she knows,” Courtney adds. “I’d tell her to stop being so self-deprecating, because that’s not being polite or relatable, that’s you downplaying what you’ve achieved, and disrespecting people’s belief and investment in you.
“And stop getting hair extensions, too,” she laughs. “Because you’re absolutely ruining your hair…”
Back in 2021, a half-dozen weeks following the release of Eternal Blue, Courtney LaPlante, Michael Stringer and producer Dan Braunstein took a trip to the Los Angeles leg of Slipknot’s Knotfest at the 20,000-plus capacity BMO Stadium, home to the Los Angeles FC soccer team. There, Cherry Bombs – the Cirque du Soleil-style “Macabret” troupe led by Corey Taylor’s partner, Alicia Dove – took to the stage between sets from Killswitch Engage and Bring Me The Horizon to a soundtrack that made the Spiribox trio sit up in the their seats.
“All of a sudden, we hear Holy Roller just blast out of the PA, and they’re doing this whole sexy-ass fire dance to it,” laughs Courtney. “It was so sick, and we joked, ‘Well, that’s the last time that song is going to be played in this stadium!’ Dan turned to us, shook his head and said, ‘You’re going to be playing that song at this place one day.’ We laughed at him then, but last fall, we supported Korn in that exact stadium and stood on that exact stage playing Holy Roller…’”
In just a handful of days, the song will ring out in stadiums once again, albeit one four-times the size and 6,000 miles removed from the BMO. Que será, será, whatever will be, will be… Spiritbox are off to Wembley. Courtney deems it an “honour” that Linkin Park would invite them to open up a “defining” moment for not just their band, but a heavy music community in rude health.
"There’s not a lot of artists that would sell out Wembley Stadium that we might be a good match to open for,” she considers. “It’s so incredible that a band like Linkin Park would invite us to share such a huge moment for them. I would never have thought that anyone would hear our music in that context. We’re about to see how Cellar Door sounds like when it’s blasted in a stadium that size, so... let’s see how that goes (laughs).”
“We’re about to see how Cellar Door sounds like when it’s blasted in a stadium that size!”
In the fullness of time, it’s a show, an achievement, that will no doubt be a bucket list event. Yet it’s telling that it’s the more human experiences – and not any of the other almost incomprehensible points of stratospheric success – that Courtney elects to pick when asked to choose the ‘pinch-me’ moments of the Spiritbox journey so far. Even more so that the first she reaches for is “every time I see Michael get the recognition he deserves as a musician”.
She readily admits to being brought to tears by watching kids pick up a guitar and post videos of themselves clumsily plunking their way through riffs her husband wrote. “To see someone inspired in such a way by what Michael has done makes me so incredibly proud of him, and of us, doing this together,” she says.
Text messages from artists the pair have long admired don’t only light up her phone, but her face, too. And though she might joke that the metric of success can be measured by how many peers, industry folk and the coolest of the cool are rubbernecking from the side of the stage during Spiritbox sets, Courtney measures it instead – as one who has fought tooth and nail for this moment well might – by longevity, sustainability and the retention of authenticity.
On Eternal Blue’s lead single, Circle With Me, Courtney took on the voice of “my Devil telling me, ‘Compromise who you are, and all this can be yours…’” she told us at the time of the song’s release. “I think what grounds me in everything we experience,” she adds today, “is confidence in the knowledge that there is an alternate reality where the journey we’ve been on doesn’t happen to us, and knowing that we’re making the same music and expressing the same things regardless of whether we’re playing to 10 people or 10,000 people.
“We’re still going to play the music that we feel compelled to play,” she says. “We’re still going to make music that we feel compelled to make. That’s how it’s always going to be.
“That’s what success looks like to me. It really is.”
Get your limited-edition Spiritbox Kerrang! zine.
Tsunami Sea is out now via Pale Chord in partnership with Rise Records. Spiritbox support Linkin Park at Wembley Stadium on Saturday, June 28 – get your tickets now.
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