By Greg Maki
Much has been written about Spiritbox during the past few years as the band emerged from Canada to become one of the buzziest of buzz bands in heavy music’s recent history. The 2021 debut full-length “Eternal Blue” justified the hype, and not content to rest on its early success, the band continued to experiment and refine its sound with the “Rotoscope” (2022) and “The Fear of Fear” (2023) EPs. Amid all the praise, what sometimes gets overlooked, though, is that in this age of instant gratification and short attention spans, Spiritbox is a band that creates albums, full pieces of work with thematic throughlines that build and play off each other, every song enhancing the power and impact of those that came before it.
Never has this been more apparent than on “Tsunami Sea,” the band’s long-awaited second full-length.
From the opening sludgy chug of “Fata Morgana,” the music here washes over the listener like the massive wave of the album’s title, pulling them down into the depths of singer Courtney LaPlante’s anxieties and insecurities. Shifting from anguished screams to hypnotic melodies as the mood fits, LaPlante is our guide on this tumultuous journey, while guitarist/co-producer Mike Stringer leads a musical attack that pulls from metalcore, nu metal and djent bathed in an—at times subtle, at others more overt—electronic sheen. A feel-good album this is not, and a pair of heartbreaking tracks lead us to the end—”Ride the Wave” (“Ride the wave like a message in a bottle/For the only words I ever wanna hear/I will wait with syllables I swallow/Bitter taste until they disappear”) and “Deep End” (“Down in the deep end/I couldn’t see straight/I shouldn’t be here/Watching the world fade”).
“Tsunami Sea” is mesmerizing from start to finish. It embraces the more experimental nature Spiritbox explored before and after “Eternal Blue” while retaining that record’s more straightforward, song-oriented approach. Yet it still presents a collection of music that adds up to more than the sum of its parts when played in its entirety. Equal parts epic and accessible, “Tsunami Sea” is a powerful, unstoppable musical statement.
Rating: 10/10
Rise Records/Pale Chord Music – March 7, 2025
LINKS:
Buy/save/stream “Tsunami Sea”
www.facebook.com/spiritboxofficial
www.instagram.com/spiritboxmusic
www.x.com/spiritboxband
www.youtube.com/spiritboxofficial
www.tiktok.com/@spiritboxband
