Spiritbox

Two people who left a band and started again

Spiritbox began as an exit. Courtney LaPlante and Mike Stringer, a couple and the band's two fixed points, left Iwrestledabearonce in 2015, and in October 2017 launched a new project from Victoria on Vancouver Island. A self-titled EP followed on 27 October 2017, and for its first stretch Spiritbox behaved more like a recording outfit than a touring band, gathering scattered tracks into a Singles Collection on 26 April 2019.

The lineup filled in gradually around the two founders. Josh Gilbert has been the full-time bassist and a backing vocalist since 2023; Zev Rosenberg plays drums. The sound settled into metalcore with progressive structures and electronic texture, with LaPlante moving between clean singing pitched closer to contemporary R&B and a low, abrasive scream — a split that most of the band's better-known songs are built around.

Eternal Blue, and the EPs that kept the temperature up

The debut album Eternal Blue arrived on 17 September 2021 through Rise Records and the band's own Pale Chord imprint, and entered the Billboard 200 at number 13. "Holy Roller" topped SiriusXM's Devil's Dozen, and "Circle With Me" went on to earn a gold certification from the RIAA. Those two songs remain the oldest material the band still plays regularly.

Rather than rush a second album, Spiritbox put out two EPs: Rotoscope on 22 June 2022 and The Fear of Fear on 3 November 2023. The second of those supplied "Jaded" and "Cellar Door", the songs that started the band's Grammy run. Alongside that came a string of collaborations well outside metal — "Shivering" with Illenium in 2022, the rock remix of Megan Thee Stallion's "Cobra" in 2023 and "TYG" with her in 2024, and "My Queen" with Babymetal in 2025.

Tsunami Sea

The second album, Tsunami Sea, came out on 7 March 2025 on Pale Chord and Rise, running 43 minutes and 40 seconds. It was recorded in 2024 with Dan Braunstein producing, Stringer engineering, Zakk Cervini mixing and Ted Jensen mastering. Three singles set it up: "Soft Spine" on 6 September 2024, "Perfect Soul" on 18 November 2024 and "No Loss, No Love" on 6 February 2025.

Commercially it did better in Britain than in the United States in relative terms, reaching number 17 on the UK albums chart and number one on the UK independent albums chart, against number 26 on the Billboard 200. Reviews were strong enough to push its Metacritic average to 85. Tom Morgan in NME described its "punishing elegance"; Metal Hammer gave it four and a half stars and placed the band in the same conversation as Bring Me The Horizon and Sleep Token. The record's sleeve also won the 2026 Juno Award for Album Artwork of the Year, credited to art director Kevin Moore and photographer Kyle Joinson.

Three nominations, no statue

On 1 February 2026 Spiritbox played "Soft Spine" at the Grammy Premiere Ceremony, the daytime event that precedes the televised show, introduced by Darren Criss. The song was nominated for Best Metal Performance — the band's third consecutive nomination in that category after "Jaded" in 2024 and "Cellar Door" in 2025. The award went to Turnstile for "Birds".

Losing three in a row has not slowed the band's rise in the slightest; the performance itself, streamed rather than broadcast, did more for them than the result. It is also the reason the current tour is being sold on a bigger scale than anything they have headlined before.

A surprise single and the first arena run

The UK and European headline tour was announced on 23 February 2026, with British tickets going on general sale on 27 February through Live Nation, and Jinjer and Dying Wish attached as support for the whole run. It opened at Glasgow's SEC Hall 3 on 12 September, takes in Nottingham's Motorpoint Arena on 14 September, Manchester's Co-op Live on 16 September — the band's largest UK headline show to date — Cardiff on 17 September and the OVO Arena Wembley in London on 19 September, before crossing to the continent for Berlin, Gliwice, Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Luxembourg and Antwerp, finishing at La Seine Musicale in Paris on 9 October.

The summer before it was spent as a support act rather than a headliner. Evanescence announced their 2026 world tour on 1 December 2025 with Spiritbox and Nova Twins on most North American dates, a 31-show run through arenas and amphitheatres that started in West Palm Beach on 11 June and ended at Clarkston, Michigan on 2 August.

Five days before the Glasgow opener, on 7 September 2026, the band put out "Mourning" without warning — a standalone single, their first new music since Tsunami Sea, again produced by Braunstein, with a video directed by Stringer and Alex Bemis that moves from black and white into colour. Musically it sits closer to rock than metal: the riff is not the engine, the guitars work as blocks of colour, and LaPlante is given far more space for clean singing than anything on the last album allowed.

Opening night in Glasgow

The first show of the tour ran from 9.10pm to 10.30pm — fifteen songs and a taped interlude, the Tsunami Sea Poem, dropped in at the midpoint. The band opened with the first five tracks of Tsunami Sea in album order, from "Fata Morgana" through "Black Rainbow", "Perfect Soul" and "Keep Sweet" to "Soft Spine", before reaching back to The Fear of Fear for "Cellar Door", "Jaded" and "The Void". Only two songs came from Eternal Blue: "Circle With Me" and "Holy Roller", placed together in the second half. The night closed on the live debut of "Mourning", an unusual choice of finale for a band with two certified crowd songs available.

The staging is projection-led rather than prop-led: large white drapes take the imagery, a curtain drops early, and the backdrop shifts from a static globe to smoke. LaPlante works the full width of the stage in PVC and trailing ribbons, with Stringer and Gilbert holding the flanks, and there is a drum solo — a choice one reviewer in Glasgow rated as well made. The same review noted that the newer material landed as hard as the old, and that the band made an arena-scale room feel smaller than it is, before predicting they would be at the Hydro next time.

The support bill is unusually heavy for an opening pair. Dying Wish played eight songs in half an hour and had a circle pit going almost immediately; Jinjer followed with nine songs in 50 minutes, opening with "Perennial" and closing on "Pisces" and the title track of Duél, and for a visible share of the Glasgow crowd Tatiana Shmayluk's set was the reason they were in the building.