Spiritbox - "Tsunami Sea"
A highly-anticipated album that doesn't disappoint
Prog Metalcore darlings Spiritbox, fronted by the inimitable Courtney LaPlante, have been at the top of the modern Metal scene since breaking through with their 2021 debut album, Eternal Blue.
I still vividly remember that first listen — on a run for a grocery pickup, I put this album on after seeing several people rave about it on Reddit or something. The album released in September of that year, but I didn’t listen to it until the week between Christmas and New Years. Despite finding it so late and not having much time to sit with it, Eternal Blue ranked 21st on that year’s Top 40 list (prior to this outlet, unfortunately), and was one of my most exciting discoveries of the year.
Its eventual successor, which has now arrived in the form of Tsunami Sea, has been highly anticipated — by myself and many others. In the meanwhile, Spiritbox released two EPs: Rotoscope in 2022 and The Fear of Fear in 2023.1 LaPlante has stated that she enjoys the smaller scope and cycle of EPs, so we can probably expect the band to regularly pump out EPs and leave LPs on longer cycles going forward.
As with Jinjer, I need to stress to anybody thinking of giving Spiritbox a shot that the band utilizes a mix of gorgeous clean vocals and hyper-aggressive harsh vox. But the band only has the one vocalist — LaPlante excels at switching from clean to harsh and back again. Her harsh style falls in line with the standard sort of screams that you usually get in Metalcore, sometimes with a tinge of death growl gravel.
The rest of the band is generally tuned low, providing a sharp, heavy contrast to LaPlante’s cleans (or underscoring her harsh vocals). Mike Stringer (guitar, backing vox) is the band’s other founding member; he and LaPlante were in Iwrestledabearonce together. After getting engaged, they opted to leave the band in 2015 and took a break from touring, getting married in 2016, and ultimately launching Spiritbox in 2017.
Josh Gilbert (ex-As I Lay Dying) plays bass on Tsunami Sea, and this is his first LP (he was also on The Fear of Fear) with the band, taking over from former bassist Bill Crook, who left the band in 2022 and then passed in 2024.2 I won’t lie — I can rarely tell the bass and guitar apart; the guitar is tuned low.
Thankfully, YouTube exists and my reviews come late, so I can link videos to show how the guitar and bass lines layer on top of one another to form a really solid, tight foundation — in this case, on “Soft Spine”. Gilbert and Stringer have to be in perfect sync to pull this off. It’s impressive.
But they rocketed to the top for a reason.
Lastly, there’s Zev Rosenberg, who’s been on Spiritbox’s drum kit since 2020, and absolutely killing it the whole time. He’s incredibly dynamic throughout Tsunami Sea. Zero notes.
The album as a whole has no obvious throughlines; whatever concept the band brought to this album, it isn’t immediately obvious to me after several listens and reading the lyrics. That doesn’t mean the band doesn’t have anything to say.
Across its eleven tracks, Tsunami Sea says a lot. Sometimes loud and angry, like on “Soft Spine”; sometimes soft and sad, like on title track “Tsunami Sea”. There is plenty of tonal variety on the album, with several songs using unique influences or sounds to help set them apart.
If you’re after something pretty, “Perfect Soul” and “Tsunami Sea” are gorgeous songs. On the other end of the spectrum, “Fata Morgana” and “Soft Spine” are non-stop assaults, with the latter being one of the angriest tracks I’ve heard in a long time. LaPlante states that it’s about the people and systems in the music industry that she doesn’t like.
However.
It can also easily be read as a political criticism of followers of a certain ideology:
You steal the echo from their ghosts
You pick your teeth with sacred bones
I hate the ones that love you
And those who profit from you
It's time to reap the tide you sow[ . . . ]
Your God will sort you when you die
And if that isn’t the hardest line I’ve heard in a while. Holy fuck.
This reading is validated, in my mind, because the song it follows (“Keep Sweet”) is about LaPlante’s time living in Alabama and what she learned about cultures and systems which keep women suppressed. I cannot find the original Apple Music link, but here is the quote excerpt which was included on the song’s Genius page:
“I moved to the island from Alabama when I was 15. In Alabama, I was around people that were very conservative and extremely traditional. More so than the friends I made in Canada, I think I was exposed to how religion is used to subjugate women. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ‘keeping sweet,’ which is something that exists throughout different types of Christianity and other religions. It basically just means that women need to maintain their femininity, which in our society is softness, kindness, and empathy-but also humbleness and meekness. It’s kind of a mantra that’s repeated to us. We’re socialized to be complacent, which is what the song is about.”
“Keep Sweet” also specifically calls out (through coded phrasing) the crimes of Warren Jeffs.
Several other songs relate to life on Vancouver Island, such as “A Haven With Two Faces, “No Loss, No Love”, and “Ride the Wave”.
Mental health and depression are consistent thematic concerns.
At large, the album is full of contrasts — musically both heavy and atmospheric in turns (and occasionally simultaneously), with imagery which ebbs and flows and lyricism which calls back to other songs on Tsunami Sea as well as back to Eternal Blue.
Several songs focus exclusively on the heavy and use only harsh vocals, but they’re so well done that I still get a crap-ton of enjoyment out of them. Would I prefer and album of just LaPlante’s gorgeous cleans? Yeah, probably. But I really like this one as-is.
This one fully clears the bar.
Rating: Blue
I have yet to listen to either of these; many artists recycle EP material into their next LP, and I worry that pre-existing familiarity skews my reviews, so I avoid singles and EPs as much as possible until I have a chance to listen to the album.
LaPlante’s statements on how the band approaches all of its albums gives me reason to believe I might be able to risk it with Spiritbox EPs going forward.
I do not have any information regarding Crook’s cause of death, but he was a beloved member of the Metalcore community and the music scene in and around Vancouver. By all accounts, he was a stand-up guy, and spent a lot of his free time helping to promote mental health and suicide prevention. I’m including, below, donation links to several suicide prevention organizations:
Tsunami Sea’s closing track, “Deep End”, is a tribute to Crook. It was written before he passed, and so isn’t explicitly about him, but LaPlante told MetalHammer that the song has become her “beacon to him”.