Spiritbox and the Softening of the Strange
Spiritbox didn't become bad overnight. That would be too simple, and honestly, too boring.
The frustrating thing is that they were interesting first. The self-titled Spiritbox EP and Singles Collection had a strange, tensile quality: progressive metalcore that felt haunted by negative space, all glassy atmosphere, djent pressure, and Courtney LaPlante’s voice moving through the songs like both blade and vapor. It was heavy, yes, but heaviness wasn't the only trick. The appeal was in the architecture. Somewhere along the way, that architecture got renovated for better lighting.
What followed wasn't a total abandonment of heaviness, and that distinction matters. Spiritbox can still write crushing moments. They can still scream, still groove, and still drop a riff with enough force to make the room flinch. But the center of gravity changed. The early unease gave way to polish. The progressive tension tightened into hookcraft; the strange became sleek, and the ghost got a contour kit.
That's where the baddiecore conversation starts.
To clarify, I don't use "baddiecore" as shorthand for "women like this band, therefore it is fake metal," because that argument is moldy basement water and should be poured directly down the drain. The issue isn't femininity, nor is it aesthetics. The issue certainly isn't Courtney LaPlante being charismatic, stylish, beautiful, or marketable. Metal has survived decades of men in corpse paint, leather pants, eyeliner, bullet belts, and theatrical nonsense. Nobody gets to suddenly discover the dangers of image just because the frontwoman has a good makeup brush.
The issue is the sound. More specifically, the problem is what happens when a band that once sounded genuinely uncanny starts sanding itself down into something increasingly legible to the modern metal streaming economy: clean lines, glossy production, huge choruses, curated heaviness, and songs that feel built to circulate seamlessly through playlists, reaction channels, festival slots, and TikTok edits.
That isn't the same as saying Spiritbox is talentless. They aren't. In fact, that's exactly why it's annoying. Bad bands are easy to dismiss, but Spiritbox is frustrating because the talent is undeniably still there. Courtney remains one of the most compelling vocalists in modern heavy music, capable of moving from glass-clear melody to full-body violence without making either mode feel like a costume. Mike Stringer is still a distinctive guitarist, and the band still understands atmosphere. They still know how to make a breakdown feel expensive—but expensive is part of the problem.
The early Spiritbox material had a different kind of atmosphere. The self-titled EP didn't sound like a band trying to be enormous; it sounded like a band trying to build a room you couldn't fully map. “The Mara Effect” suite moved with patience and tension, while “Aphids” had this crawling, unstable pressure. “The Beauty of Suffering” felt expansive without becoming obvious. Even when the production was cleaner than a lot of underground metalcore, there was still a sense of distance and weirdness. The songs breathed strangely.
Then, Singles Collection sharpened that promise. “Perennial,” “Electric Cross,” “Trust Fall,” “Belcarra,” and “Bleach Bath” sounded like a band finding a language that was recognizably metalcore-adjacent without being trapped inside metalcore’s usual furniture. The songs had hooks, absolutely, but the hooks didn't feel like the whole point. They emerged from the tension instead of replacing it. The clean vocals felt spectral, not merely pretty, and the heavy parts felt less like scheduled impact moments and more like pressure finally finding the weak point in the wall. That's what made early Spiritbox feel special: the heaviness and melody weren't taking turns politely. They were infecting each other.
This is also why the usual defense of their later sound can feel so evasive. “They have always had clean vocals” is true, but it misses the point. The problem was never that Courtney sings, just as the problem was never melody or accessibility on its own.
The problem is what the melody started doing.
In the earlier material, melody often deepened the atmosphere, making the songs stranger, sadder, and more suspended. Later, melody increasingly became the organizing principle. The songs began to feel built around the clean hook, with the heaviness arranged around it like set dressing. The screams still arrive, and the riffs still hit, but more often, they feel contained inside a structure that already knows exactly where the chorus needs to land. That is the softening of the strange.
Eternal Blue is where the shift becomes impossible to ignore, though even there, it isn't a simple collapse. The album has real moments. “Holy Roller” is still a monster, “Circle With Me” works because it understands scale, and “Constance” is emotionally effective without needing to prove how heavy it can be. There's a reason the album connected with people, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But Eternal Blue also marks the point where Spiritbox became easier to summarize. The mystery thinned. The songs became more polished, more digestible, and more streamlined. The band didn't lose their identity, exactly; they just made it brighter, smoother, and more readable from a distance.
And once that happened, the machine knew exactly what to do with them.
Modern heavy music doesn't need a band to become Imagine Dragons with breakdowns in order to absorb them. The process is more subtle than that. The edges stay visible, the screams stay in the mix, and the guitars remain heavy enough to reassure everyone that this is still metal. However, the overall shape becomes more compatible with the market: big choruses, a clean visual identity, genre fluidity that never becomes too inconvenient, heaviness deployed in satisfying bursts, and production so polished it starts to feel laminated.
This is where “selling out” becomes both tempting and insufficient. It's tempting because, from the outside, the trajectory looks obvious: a strange progressive metalcore band becomes increasingly glossy, popular, and positioned as one of the big crossover names in modern metal. The early weirdness becomes less central as the songs become more stream-friendly and the presentation more fashion-conscious. The whole project starts to look less like a haunted machine and more like a premium product with tasteful shadows.
But “selling out” also implies a level of intentional calculation that we can't actually prove. Courtney has pushed back on the idea that Spiritbox is making music according to some commercial formula, and I believe her when she says there isn't a shadowy label goblin demanding a specific BPM, song length, or clean chorus quota. That isn't how most of this works. A band doesn't have to sit down and say, “Let's cater to the mainstream,” for the music to become more mainstream-facing.
Sometimes the incentives are ambient. Sometimes success teaches a band which version of itself travels farthest. Sometimes the audience grows around a particular sound, and the band keeps feeding the room that keeps opening its mouth. Sometimes “evolution” and “optimization” wear the exact same perfume. That is the more interesting criticism. It isn't that Spiritbox cynically betrayed metal in a boardroom, or that Courtney is lying, or that fans are stupid for liking the newer material.
The point is that intent doesn't erase outcome, and the outcome is a band whose early progressive strangeness has been increasingly softened into a smoother, more consumable form of modern metalcore.
You can hear it in how the later releases handle heaviness. Rotoscope leaned into a sleeker, industrial-pop pulse. The Fear of Fear had heavy moments, especially “Cellar Door,” but even there, the EP felt incredibly controlled—almost too controlled. “Jaded” is a strong song, but it's also Spiritbox at their most neatly packaged: emotional, heavy enough, melodic enough, polished enough, dramatic enough, and instantly understandable. It's good, but it's also suspiciously perfect for the lane they now occupy.
That lane is exactly what people are trying to name when they say “baddiecore.”
The term is messy. It's half-joke, half-genre tag, and half-insult—which is one too many halves because the math is already cursed. It carries obvious baggage, especially because people love using taste as a way to sneer at women, younger fans, hot people, pop sensibility, makeup, sexuality, and anything that makes metal feel less like a locked shed full of divorced men arguing about blast beats. The term needs to be handled carefully, but it does point toward something real: a style of modern heavy music where metalcore, pop, alternative metal, R&B-adjacent melody, nu-metal drama, influencer-era aesthetics, and huge clean hooks all become part of the same glossy organism. It's heavy music that knows how to pose. It's heavy music with good lighting, where the breakdown isn't just a musical event, but a clip waiting to happen.
Spiritbox fits that world now far more comfortably than their early material suggested they would.
That doesn't make every later song bad. Tsunami Sea especially complicates the argument because it isn't some total descent into toothless pop-metal. “Soft Spine” has real bite, “No Loss, No Love” tries to get knotty, and “Fata Morgana” has scale and force. There are moments where the band seems to remember that tension is more interesting than sheen. But even when Tsunami Sea reaches for complexity, it often feels like complexity under glass. The production is massive, but massiveness isn't the same as danger. The songs are adventurous in places, but the adventure rarely feels out of control. Spiritbox no longer sounds like they might disappear into the fog they created. They sound like they've mapped the fog, lit it professionally, and sold tickets.
That is the disappointment.
The early releases had a sense of discovery. They sounded like a band making strange shapes because the strange shape was the point. Later Spiritbox often sounds like a band making refined Spiritbox songs: sleek, dramatic, efficient, heavy in the correct places, beautiful in the correct places, and strange only when the strangeness can be folded back into the brand. The uncanny became aesthetic. The pressure became choreography. The atmosphere became a mood board.
And maybe that's enough for most people. Maybe that's why they are bigger now. Maybe the streamlined version of Spiritbox is exactly the version built to survive in a metal landscape where bands are expected to be heavy, accessible, visually coherent, emotionally direct, algorithmically portable, and festival-ready all at once.
But I miss the version of Spiritbox that felt less certain of itself.
I miss when the songs felt like rooms with wrong dimensions. I miss when Courtney’s cleans sounded less like a hook arriving and more like a figure appearing at the end of a hallway. I miss when the riffs didn't feel arranged around impact moments, but rather like they were growing out of the song’s nervous system. I miss when the band’s beauty had more rot under it.
That's why “Spiritbox went mainstream” feels too flat as a criticism. Plenty of bands get bigger without losing the thing that made them compelling. Popularity isn't the crime. Accessibility isn't the crime. Clean vocals aren't the crime. Looking good in a music video is absolutely not the crime.
The crime is becoming less strange.
Or maybe it's not a crime; maybe it's just a loss.
Spiritbox is still good at what they do. They may even be better, technically, at building the kind of songs they want to build now. But the version of the band that first felt genuinely special wasn't special because it was perfectly constructed. It was special because it felt slightly unstable. It had an atmosphere that didn't always resolve cleanly. It had heaviness that didn't always arrive like a scheduled appointment, and it had melody that haunted the song instead of selling it.
Now, too often, the haunting feels decorative. And that is the softening of the strange: not the disappearance of heaviness, but the domestication of it. Not the absence of talent, but the refinement of talent into something safer. Not a band becoming unrecognizable, but a band becoming too recognizable, too quickly.
Spiritbox didn't lose their sound. They just made it easier to consume.
For some listeners, that's evolution. For me, it feels like watching fog get bottled and sold as perfume.
