Tsunami Sea

For their second album, Canadian metalcore phenoms Spiritbox found inspiration at home. In fact, vocalist Courtney LaPlante and guitarist Mike Stringer’s home island of Victoria, British Columbia, *was* the inspiration. “When we were trying to get this band off the ground, we were feeling really stuck and hopeless,” LaPlante tells Apple Music. “I was thinking back to that time, and it brought back this subconscious dread, because we’re near all the scary tectonic plates on the West Coast. Since we were little kids, everyone’s been telling us about how ‘the big one’ is coming.” Of course, a massive earthquake at sea would cause a massive tsunami. “A tsunami is a horrible natural disaster that can’t be helped, but imagine if the entire ocean was a tsunami, not just one small part of it,” LaPlante offers. “It felt like such an over-the-top, perfect example of the drama you feel when you’re depressed. And that was my mental state at the time. But even saying I was depressed is embarrassing to me because I’ve achieved the life I’ve always wanted to achieve, so it feels like a moral failing to be depressed. In that way, the album became a score for my life.” Below, she comments on each song. **“Fata Morgana”** “When Michael and \[producer\] Dan \[Braunstein\] were making this at our house, I was frantically cleaning the bathroom while our puppy was taking a nap, because I knew I only had about 30 minutes before he’d wake up. But I could hear everything they were doing, and Michael just started playing this hypnotizing riff. Right away, I knew it was the intro track and the mission statement for the whole record. I started writing in my head right there in the bathroom. I thought, ‘My god, I cannot wait to walk out onstage to this song.’ The other fun fact about this one is that the vocal pattern was inspired by Busta Rhymes.” **“Black Rainbow”** “One of the reasons I wanted to call this song ‘Black Rainbow’ is because the director \[Panos Cosmatos\] that made *Beyond the Black Rainbow* is from our island. He moved here as a teenager, like I did, and I’ve just always felt a bit of camaraderie with anyone that’s left the island—people like Pamela Anderson and Nelly Furtado. But that movie was very disturbing to me, and it’s basically about someone dropped into something where they become completely disoriented. Which is how I feel sometimes.” **“Perfect Soul”** “This song feels very pop to me, though I never intended it to be that way. It’s very sincere and dramatic. It’s a song about someone who’s kind of saying, ‘You’ve taken everything from me. There’s nothing more to take, so just leave me here.’ It’s a relationship that’s so far gone that there’s nothing we can do to repair it. Instead of having a traditional breakdown like we’d normally do, this one is cool because Michael uses an EBow on his guitar and takes a full minute to bend a note. It’s a bit of an homage to one of his favorite artists, Cloudkicker, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the album.” **“Keep Sweet”** “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.” **“Soft Spine”** “I don’t really know the people that are part of my peer group. I don’t go to parties and meet people and hang out and stuff. But there’s so many nasty people in the music industry, and they probably know who I am, but they probably don’t know that I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to know them. This song is saying ‘fuck you’ to them. It’s my fantasy of having the leverage and power to negatively impact their wallets. I can’t beat anybody up or kick anyone’s ass, but the narrator in the song can, and they’re not scared to do it.” **“Tsunami Sea”** “I love this song so much. Before there were lyrics, I knew this one would be the title song. But I wanted to think of a more intimate reason for the album to be called *Tsunami Sea* that I could use for this song—rather than just the big, bold, theatrical idea of a natural disaster destroying everything. Here, it’s a metaphor to explain panic attacks or when you’re so sad and depressed and low, and you can’t stop crying. I thought about how many teardrops it would take to fill up a whole ocean of tsunamis. I’m using that to destroy everything and drown myself rather than deal with my problems.” **“A Haven with Two Faces”** “Conceptually, the haven with two faces is our town. It makes you unique and creative and different because you have to overcome a lot to get off the island and be an artist, but at the same time, it really hinders you because you just feel misunderstood. It’s extra weird living here because of the physical isolation combined with the normal isolation that you might feel. It’s got that small-town feeling, but then you can’t drive out of it. At the same time, it’s a beautiful place to grow up.” **“No Loss, No Love”** “On this song, I’m imagining a person in the middle of the ocean on a life raft. It’s after the tsunami has destroyed everything. They have no food, no drink. Everything they love is gone. But it’s the eye of the storm, so everything seems calm and safe. It’s like a person who feels secure in their mental health even though they stopped taking their medication. It’s that false clarity you feel when you’ve been deep, deep down and now all your endorphins and serotonin are shooting back up. The person on the raft thinks they see an abundant island, a safe place to get off, but it’s actually dangerous.” **“Crystal Roses”** “This is a gentler version of the scariness of ‘No Loss, No Love.’ You’re floating across the ocean, thinking, ‘Whatever will be will be.’ All these mystical elements of the supernatural world are beckoning the raft this way or that way. Michael wrote this because he wanted to make something completely out of left field, and the drum loop just put me in a trance. One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a couple years now is to use a live formant to pitch my voice up and down in real time. I like it because it takes any gender out of my voice. Is it a guy? A girl? Is it me? You can’t tell.” **“Ride the Wave”** “When I heard Michael and Dan working on the chorus, I knew I had to get my Jimmy Eat World on. I love that band, but our bass player, Josh \[Gilbert\], is the ultra-mega Jimmy Eat World stan. When he joined the band, that’s one of the ways we really bonded. He knows all the lore, so I’ve learned more about Jimmy Eat World in the last two years than I had ever known in my life. One of the things I love about that band is that the harmony vocal is just as important as the melody. So, the chorus of this is my voice and Josh’s voice together, and the harmony isn’t just supportive.” **“Deep End”** “This song was originally called ‘Deep Dish.’ We wrote the first half years ago, when we were working on our *Rotoscope* EP. Afterwards, we went out and celebrated with deep-dish pizza at a spot down the road from the studio. Towards the end of the meal, we were like, ‘What are we going to name the song?’ We looked at our food and agreed: ‘Deep Dish.’ And this song is the final goodbye for the album. It’s about a person making all these excuses for their own shortcomings, tying themselves down with it and admitting defeat. It’s a very sad song, but it’s uplifting musically. It’s got my favorite riff that Michael has ever made.”