Rock
Page: 15
Universal Pictures Content Group announced on Friday (March 14) that it has begun production on a documentary chronicling heavy metal icons Iron Maiden‘s 50-year career. The currently untitled film is slated for release internationally in the fall, with U.S. theatrical distribution details to be confirmed later.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
According to a release, the long-awaited doc is an “emotive journey through Iron Maiden’s 50 Year history told from the perspective of both the band and some of their most devoted followers – from longstanding superfans to established names from the worlds of film and music such as Javier Bardem, Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons.”
In addition, the doc is slated to feature exclusive interviews with key band members and the final interview with original vocalist, Paul Di’Anno, who died in October 2024 at 66 from a tear in the sac around his heart. In addition to rare archival footage of the group, the doc will also include all-new animated sequences with Maiden’s fan-favorite ghoulish grin zombie mascot Eddie, who has appeared on all their album covers.
Trending on Billboard
“We’re proud Universal Pictures Content Group has chosen to share the unique story of Iron Maiden with the world,” said Maiden manager Rod Smallwood in a statement about the film that will be directed by Malcolm Venville (Churchill At War). “We have given them unrestricted access to the band, our fans and musical peers. We trust that they will excite not only music fans but also anyone who loves a story of an underdog beating the odds to become and remain one of Britain’s biggest musical exports since our first record released 45 years ago.”
The movie description continues, “The film offers a unique visual experience that highlights Iron Maiden’s widespread impact and the strong connection between the band and their truly global army of fans. The film also explores the cultural movement Iron Maiden has helped shape and their enduring legacy in both music and fan culture, challenging common perceptions of the wider significance of rock music and heavy metal.”
Iron Maiden formed in East London in 1975 and helped spearhead a resurgent wave of British metal on their way to selling more than 100 million records worldwide thanks to such hard-charging hit singles as “Run to the Hills,” “The Number of the Beast,” “Aces High,” “Flight of Icarus,” “The Trooper” and “Hallowed Be Thy Name.”
“We’re thrilled Iron Maiden have entrusted us to bring their legacy to cinemas around the world,” said Universal Pictures Content group executive vice president Helen Parker. “Working closely with the band and their passionate fans has been an unrivalled experience allowing us to tell their story in a unique way and celebrate their incomparable fearless creativity in their 50th anniversary year.” The film will be produced by Dominic Freeman (Spirits in the Forest – a Depeche Mode Film), with Parker serving as executive producer.
Iron Maiden will launch their 50th anniversary Run For Your Lives tour in Budapest on May 27, with 32 other dates currently scheduled throughout Europe through August 2.
We still don’t know who will join Liam and Noel Gallagher on stage for Oasis‘ eagerly anticipated 2025 reunion tour. But even if you weren’t able to score tickets to the siblings’ upcoming first live shows since their acrimonious break-up in 2009, you will definitely be able to re-live it thanks to a just-announced live film chronicling the get-back nobody thought would ever happen.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The band announced on Thursday morning (March 13) that a film documenting the Oasis Live ’25 tour will be created and produced by BAFTA- and Oscar-nominated writer/producer/director Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Spencer, Dirty Pretty Things) and directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (Meet Me in the Bathroom, Shut Up and Play the Hits).
No release date has been announced yet — and no further details were revealed about the content of the film — for the project that will be distributed by Sony Music Vision.
Trending on Billboard
Fans are starved for any information about the tour, including who will be performing alongside singer Liam and guitarist/occasional vocalist and songwriter Noel, though a report from the NME that purported to have the inside scoop on the rest of the band earlier this week was quickly rubbished by Liam.
After the British music mag claimed to have the line-up thanks to “sources working closely with the band and tour,” Liam slapped back in a post in which he demanded, “NME tell me who your source pots are that keep giving you info about OASIS and I’ll give you an exclusive interview about up n coming OASIS tour. You can have it all but how much do you want it.”
A short time later, he added, “It’s not the lineup reveal I’m bothered about I’ll reveal that to you in a minute I’m more bothered about the line where it says a source close to the band and tour that really causes me a great deal of concern.” Forever cheeky, Liam then confirmed who would be on stage with him and his brother, claiming it would be ““Tony Mc drums Alan white bass guitar Zak lead guitar Chris Sharrock keys.”
Fans in the know quickly surmised he was just kidding, since all four men served as drummers in the band at some point. “That’s a BANGING line up,” Liam joked.
Oasis have announced 40 dates so far for the Live ’25 tour, which will kick off on July 4 with the first of two shows at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, criss-crossing the U.K. before landing in Toronto on August 24 for a run of North American stadium dates, then moving on to Mexico City, South Korean, Japan, Australia and South America.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono were never shy about sharing their love story with the cameras. The late Beatle and his wife/Plastic Ono Band co-leader are center stage in the first trailer for One to One: John & Yoko, an upcoming documentary from Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald that tells the story of a life-changing, fast-moving 18-month period in the couple’s lives in the early 1970s.
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The two-minute clip opens with audio of Lennon calling someone named Howard, in which the woman on the other end begins to spell out the singer’s name only to realize who she’s talking to. “You’re a member of the Beatles?” she asks. “That’s right, yeah,” Lennon answers nonchalantly. From there, the footage explodes into a collage of images of bombs falling in the Vietnam war and the couple preparing for a charity show as Lennon says, “good morning, folks. Have you had your breakfast yet,” accompanied by, yes, footage of the pop icon having his bowl of morning cereal.
Trending on Billboard
We see a flip-book of footage of John and Yoko leaning into their new lives in the city, shopping for clothes and goofing around with friends as Yoko says, “the Flower Generation is over, but we can start all over again, right?,” which leads into a famous image of the couple from behind throwing up raised fists as the Statue of Liberty hovers on the horizon.
The movie is a chronicle of the couple’s new life in New York post-Beatles in 1972, following them as they move into an apartment in Greenwich Village and prepare for their One to One Concerts, a two-show all-star charity event for children with special needs that they threw at Madison Square Garden in August 1972. It was the only full-length performance by Lennon in the wake of the Fab Four’s split two years earlier and in addition to the Plastic Ono Band it featured sets by Stevie Wonder, Sha Na Na and Roberta Black, among others.
Asked by a reporter at the time why they were doing the free shows, Lennon said, “to change the apathy that the youth have.” The couple’s only child, musician Sean Ono Lennon — seen in clips as a toddler — produced and remixed the concert audio for the movie, with the trailer ending with footage of Lennon , wearing his signature tinted round eyeglasses, performing his signature hit “Imagine” at the concerts.
The film also features newly transferred and restored footage from that era along with previously unseen and unheard items from the couple’s personal archives, including phone calls and home movies recorded and filmed by Lennon and Ono during the 18 months the couple lived in a cramped Greenwich Village apartment in the early 1970s.
“How would you like to be remembered?” a reporter asks Lennon at one point. “Just as two lovers,” he responds. The movie will be released exclusively in IMAX on April 11 and in wider release on April 18 and then stream later this year on Max.
Watch the One to One trailer below.
At this point, even Billy Corgan isn’t sure what is real life and what is fantasy. Since the Smashing Pumpkins singer appeared on Howie Mandel’s Does Stuff podcast in November and revealed that his stepmother once told him that comedian Bill Burr might be one of his half-brothers after Mandel accidentally put a photo of the stand-up instead of the rocker, things have gotten progressively weirder.
After the two men were then surprised by Mandel when he had them unexpectedly meet for the first time in person on his pod earlier this year, Corgan, 57, told People magazine that the meet-weird was not a bit, but actually the real thing.
“It was one of those rare moments where I think all three of us really didn’t know where it was going. And you see that, and that’s what makes it sort of interesting,” Corgan said of the episode Mandel dubbed “Family Reunion with Bill Burr & Billy Corgan.”
“There’s enough energy there that that’s why it’s not a bit, because it’s really about confronting something in a way that none of us really knew what that confrontation would lead to, and you see it play out,” he continued. “You see jokes, but you also see kind of like, oh, there’s something there.”
It was so real, in fact, that Corgan said some close friends still ask him about the interaction, and ask for receipts. “A really good friend of mine said to me, looking around, ‘Okay, now tell me the truth.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re related,’” Corgan said. “And then my friend said, ‘Well, I think you are.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s possible because he really does look like my father in a way that’s almost shocking to me.’ So then my friend goes, ‘Well then get a DNA test.’”
While Corgan has heard stories about his late musician father — William Corgan, who died in 2021 — allegedly having a number of children out of wedlock, the rocker said one of the intriguing things about the potential mid-life reveal of a half-brother in 56-year-old fellow chrome dome Burr is that there is no definitive answer for now.
“It’s taken on a life of its own. It’s sort of strange,” Corgan said. “It really started from honest things, which are, my father may have fathered 12 other children, and the facts of Bill’s life actually do match the story that I was told. There’s no invention there.”
Burr was audibly and visibly upset by the unannounced family reunion, lambasting his longtime friend Mandel, and almost walking out of the interview in protest. “He’s bringing it here, not because he’s trying to heal the bulls–t that we went through growing up. He’s getting here just for the f–king ratings,” Burr said of Mandel during the awkward appearance.
Mandel did eventually leave the room and the two men traded stories about the man they both described as their dad, though Burr initially was not able to let go of his anger about the surprise. Asking what Mandel thought was going to happen, Burr wondered, “Are we going to play catch? We’re both in our 50s!”
Mandel later apologized for the unexpected bit, saying on a subsequent pod, “I feel horrible and I’m sorry, Bill. I’m sorry, Billy. I only tried to do something good,” noting that at that point in early February he had not heard a “peep” from his longtime friend Burr.
Metallica will be seriously in your face come this Friday (March 14). The heavy metal legends announced on Tuesday (March 11) that their 2024 Mexico City show has been optimized as an immersive experience on the Apple Vision Pro headset. The concert featuring such beloved hits as “Enter Sandman,” “One” and “Whiplash” will be beamed […]
Peter Wolf has been thinking about writing a book “for a long time.” But making a new solo album is what really prompted the former J. Geils Band frontman to get serious about it.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Wolf is “about 80 percent” finished with the album, which will be his first since 2016’s A Cure For Loneliness. “It occurred to me that my solo recordings, a lot of them went unnoticed, and I realized that if I put this out with the way things are these days, it can turn to vapor quite easily and be another lost solo effort,” Wolf — who’s just published Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses (Little, Brown) — tells Billboard. “So I thought, ‘Well, maybe now is the time to write that book I’ve been talking about for decades.’ I think if the book connects with people it would even put the wind beneath my wings to finish the record and put it out.”
Wolf also received a meaningful push from writer Peter Guralnick, best known for his acclaimed biographies of Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Sun Records founder Sam Phillips. “He read some of the things I was writing,” Wolf recalls, “and he said, ‘Y’know, Pete, you better finally do this book ’cause a lot of the people you’re gonna want to have read it might not be with us at the pace you’re going.’ That was a profound statement for me.”
Trending on Billboard
While it tracks from Wolf’s childhood to the relatively present day, Waiting on the Moon is not a standard, linear memoir. Rather, it’s a collection of stories — and a fascinating, good-humored one at that — as the New York-born Wolf regales readers with his Forrest Gump-like life of encounters with the famous, starting with a chapter titled “I Slept With Marilyn Monroe,” in which Monroe literally fell asleep on a 10-year-old Wolf while both attended a screening of the Jules Dassin film He Who Must Die at a local movie theater. (Not to worry; Monroe was with then-husband Arthur Miller and Wolf’s parents were on his other side.)
From there it’s off to the races as Wolf recounts his interactions and relationships with blues heroes such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker (sometimes in his Boston apartment) as well as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, Sly Stone, Aretha Franklin and more. He crosses paths with music biz luminaries such as Ahmet Ertegun, Bhaskar Menon, Jon Landau and Dee Anthony, gets on the wrong side of Alfred Hitchcock by declining an offer of an alcoholic drink and finds himself being courted for a part in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, Andy Warhol, onetime roommate David Lynch, Julia Child and Tennessee Williams are also among Wolf’s encounters in the pages.
“My goal was to make a book of short stories, treat each chapter like its own short story,” explains Wolf, who was an art student and radio DJ in Boston as well as a musician — first with the Hallucinations, then with the J. Geils Band starting in 1967. He fronted the latter to multi-platinum worldwide fame with Freeze-Frame in 1981, which topped the Billboard 200 in 1982 and produced the six-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Centerfold” that same year. After being asked to leave the group in 1983, Wolf kicked off a solo career with 1984’s Lights Out (its title track hit No. 12 on the Hot 100). “There was no timeline. I wasn’t concerned, in a way, about the beginning, middle and end; each story has its own beginning, middle and end. And I didn’t want this to be a kiss-and-tell book; I just wanted to write about these incredible people that I had the privilege to meet and to get to know to certain degrees and capture that.”
Wolf adds that “the two subjects I didn’t want to write about was my marriage to Faye Dunaway and the J. Geils Band,” but both are there — particularly the former, whom Wolf has been loath to discuss in this kind of detail during and after their marriage from 1974-79. “Faye was this very determined, talented person and we loved each other,” Wolf says. “I was just trying to bring her, and our relationship, somewhat to life and all the adventures we shared in it. I didn’t talk about it (before) because I would talk about my music, talk about the records, and all the other stuff was kind of private. But I was writing about the adventures in my life, and certainly she and I shared many of them. I was very surprised how quickly the stories came out.
“Of course there’s regrets; one has regrets and wishes they could do things differently, and I think I’ve expressed that in all the chapters. Some were silly, stupidities that I’ve made, and I don’t try to disguise those. It all flowed through naturally once I got into the crux of it.”
‘Waiting on the Moon’
Courtesy Photo
The J. Geils Band, meanwhile, is treated as a through-line in the book until a later chapter in which Wolf writes about explicitly about how it came apart at the peak of its career.
“It was a great shock to me, and it was a sea change for me,” says Wolf, who was part of Geils reunion tours from 1999-2015. The book also includes a vivid retelling of him being beaten up in a London pub while on his way to the band’s performance at the 1989 Pinkpop Festival in the Netherlands. “I tried to write honestly about it, my experience of it all and how I felt. I was committed to the band; it was my life, and even with my marriage to Faye our careers always came first. In other chapters you can see how hard I tried working to keep the band relevant and moving ahead, so of course when things did fall apart it was a very painful thing for me. What I didn’t add in the book that I was asked to leave the band in 1968 because they felt my vocal abilities were holding back the band.”
Wolf has recorded an audio version of Waiting On the Moon and has a handful of author appearances planned this month, starting Tuesday (March 11) at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., and including stops in New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Philadelphia and Connecticut. He did, however, cancel a planned March 21 stop at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. “due to the egregious firing of staff by the new administration.”
Wolf is also planning to get to work on the album, working with “the same cast of characters” who helped with his last few albums. “I think it’s got some really memorable songs, and I took a long time in putting it together,” he says, adding that he foresees a return to performing as well. “Yeah, that’s what I do. But the book really required a sabbatical. It’s like making a really good record that you’ve got to hunker down and commit to.” A reissue of the J. Geils Band’s 1972 concert album “Live” Full House is also slated for this year, according to Wolf.
Also on the future docket may be an induction in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which has eluded the J. Geils Band over the course of five nominations between 2005-2018. Wolf has inducted Jackie Wilson and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at previous ceremonies, and while he notes that “it’s a situation I have no control over” he makes it clear that it’s something he’d like to see happen, eventually.
“Yes, it would be a nice honor,” Wolf says. “I do feel the Geils Band contributed a lot in the AOR period of rock n’ roll. Not unlike the Stones we introduced a lot of people to (artists) like the Contours and Otis Rush and Muddy Waters and doo-wop… yet the Geils band has been looked over. I think we worked very hard for 17 and a half years, and I think we made some kind of contribution. But, to quote a Johnny Mathis song, ‘it’s not for me to say.’”
Wolf’s author appearance schedule for Waiting On the Moon includes:
Tuesday, March 11th: Harvard Bookstore at the First Parrish Church, Cambridge, MA
Wednesday, March 12th: The Strand, New York, NY
Thursday, March 13th: Bookends Bookstore, Ridgewood, NJ
Tuesday, March 18th: Writers on a New England Stage at The Music Hall, Portsmouth, NH
Thursday, March 27th: Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA
Tuesday, April 8th: RJ Julia Booksellers, Madison, CT
After co-founding Mastodon in Atlanta in 2000, guitarist/singer Brent Hinds has announced his exit from the metal band 25 years later. The group shared the news Friday (March 7) on social media, describing the decision as mutual. “Friends and Fans, After 25 monumental years together, Mastodon and Brent Hinds have mutually decided to part ways,” […]
Benmont Tench says that “life” is the reason for the 11-year gap between his two solo albums.
With The Melancholy Season out Friday (March 7), the keyboardist says that a heavy work load with both Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch kept him busy during the interim (both groups toured and released what turned out to be their final albums in the period). A nearly decade-long battle with oral cancer (which included jaw reconstruction during 2023), Petty’s death in 2017, and the birth of Tench’s first daughter, Catherine, shortly after that — not to mention the pandemic — also contributed to the gap between works.
“Life got in the way of making another record,” Tench, 71, tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Los Feliz, Calif. Already an A-list session player, he also filled some of the time after Petty’s passing playing for Ringo Starr, Jenny Lewis, Chris Stapleton, the Who and the Rolling Stones and was recently part of the Life Is a Carnival all-star tribute tour to The Band. “I would love to have made it sooner,” he says of The Melancholy Season. But, with the benefit of some perspective, he’s glad he didn’t.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“I made a better record because I didn’t make it right away,” explains Tench, who had much of album’s songs written by, he estimates, the end of 2018 and recorded it with producer Jonathan Wilson (Dawes, Father John Misty, Margo Price) during 2020 and 2021. Unlike 2014’s Glyn Johns-produced You Should Be So Lucky, which was recorded in just 13 days, Tench lived with The Melancholy Season — to its benefit, he feels.
Trending on Billboard
“I kept fine-tuning and thinking, ‘oh no, no, no, that’s all wrong. It should be this,’” he explains. “It was great to have that opportunity. I could sit with the imagery in some songs and I could check to make sure that I said things the way I wanted do.”
The Melancholy Season’s 13 songs — whether the elegiac title track or the stripped-down “Under the Starlight,” the striding, boogie-styled “Rattle” or the more dramatically arranged “Pledge” and “The Drivin’ Man” — all share a spare and spacious sensibility. The songs are played mostly by Tench, Wilson on guitars and drums and Sebastian Steinberg on bass, with appearances by Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Jenny O and, on the closing track “Dallas,” Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins, who was part of the musical community at Los Angeles’ Largo that Tench has frequented.
“I like records with a lot of space,” says Tench, citing a lesson he learned from original Heartbreakers producer Denny Cordell while making the band’s first two albums during the ‘70s. “Denny said early on that a record is louder if it has fewer instruments. A song like ‘Breakdown’ has more layers than you would think, but the essence of the song is the guitar riff and the Wurlitzer (piano) riff. There are other layers, but there’s a lot of room in ‘Breakdown.’” Additionally, Tench says he was “profoundly affected” by Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band albums. “Each of those is, for the most part, three musicians and three instruments,” Tench explains. “They’re just a songwriter with the instruments he wrote the songs on, plus bass and drums, and they are complete.
“I think it’s great if you have a wall of sound and you do it well. There are fantastic records that use a lot of instruments; the Beatles did a lot of those. There’s Motown, of course. There’s what Brian (Wilson) did, what Phil Spector did… All of these things, and they’re wonderful. But there’s also a way to use fewer instruments and be just as effective. That’s what we did on this record; there were some songs we cut with more (instrumentation) and pulled them back to make (the songs) better.”
Tench dipped into his deeper past for a couple tracks, too. “Wobbles” was an instrumental on You Should Be So Lucky, which Tench sub-titled “Trio with Vocal Arrangement” for the new album. “Under the Starlight,” meanwhile, dates back a good 20 years to a Nashville songwriting session with Don Henry and was never released.
“I dug it and we set it aside and I went home, and years went by and I didn’t think about it,” Tench says. “And then maybe eight years ago I went, ‘What about “Under the Starlight”?’ And I didn’t want to bother Don, so I thought, ‘Lemme see if some words come up.’ I had a whisper of an inkling of what I wanted to talk about that I understood better ’cause I’ve lived a lot longer and been through a lot more and began to see how to do it.
“I got in touch with Don Henry and said, ‘Hey, I finished that song we started.’ He said, ‘That’s nice, but what do you mean finished? We finished it that day.’ (laughs) We wrote the complete song and I spaced out somehow. He sent me the lyrics that we’d originally finished and they were really good, but they made a different point. I hope somebody records it that, way, too.”
The Melancholy Season is being released by Dark Horse Records, the label the late George Harrison started in 1974 and that’s being continued by his widow, Olivia, and son Dhani. “It means a hell of a lot,” notes Tench, a teenage Beatles fan who met Harrison (who worked with Petty in the Traveling Wilburys) several times. “It’s got his vibe and it’s got their vibe, which is like amplifying George’s vibe. For them to believe in this record and want to put it out means quite a lot to me. I’ve had a blessed life in a million ways — and I intend to keep it going.”
That includes on the road as well. Tench previewed The Melancholy Season during a solo residency at the Cafe Carlyle in New York last month, and he has West Coast dates starting March 12. He hopes to hit more of the country as well.
“It’ll be smaller venues because it’s just me with a piano, and I think that the songs come across best that way,” Tench says. “For me, I don’t really ‘get’ it until I see somebody do it live, so I want to drag it around, and if anybody shows up out of curiosity or because they like what I do, or because they like the Heartbreakers, it’ll give them a chance to see what they think up close.”
Tench has “a few sketches” of other songs he’s been working on but isn’t yet focusing on a next album. It’s quite likely his playing will show up on another Petty and Heartbreakers archival set, however, and Tench — who was part of Mudcrutch first, which then morphed into the Heartbreakers during 1976 — says he’s been pleased with how that musical legacy has been handled, primarily by Petty’s daughter Adria along with Ryan Ulyate and guitarist Mike Campbell.
“I’m very happy because I don’t think (Petty) would release so much of this,” says Tench, who’s read parts of Campbell’s book Heartbreaker: A Memoir, that’s coming out March 18 and is waiting for the audio version. “They still keep me in the loop but it’s mainly Adria and Ryan who are going through everything, and I love what they’re finding. Songs that I don’t remember but, ‘Oh, yeah, I loved that song. How come we left that off?’ It isn’t inferior stuff; it’s stuff that I think, if you like the band and wish you could’ve heard more, there’s more, and it’s good. And if you haven’t heard much of the band, it’s a good way to check it out. I think they’re doing a great job.”
Tench’s upcoming concert itinerary includes:
March 12—Los Angeles, CA—Largo
March 19—Los Angeles, CA—Largo
April 2—Ojai, CA—Ojai Playhouse
April 4—Santa Cruz, CA—Kuumbwa
April 5—San Francisco, CA—The Independent
April 8—Seattle, WA—Triple Door
April 9—Portland, OR—Old Church
April 11—Grass Valley, CA—Center for the Arts
April 12—Sonoma, CA—Sebastiani Theatre
For my own music, I really like to have endless possibilities,” Spiritbox leader Courtney LaPlante says. The singer believes the metal world is too preoccupied with subgenres — helpful for listeners looking for distinct flavors of heavy music but constricting for acts that want to scribble outside their assigned hard rock lines.
LaPlante says other genres aren’t quite as strict: “Look at the first few records that Doechii made and then look at the next three — there are a lot of polar opposites,” she says. “I feel like there’s a drive for artists for each album or body of work to be its own thing.”
Although Spiritbox trades in modern metalcore, the Canadian quartet has become one of the biggest new hard rock acts of the decade by reaching beyond its sonic boundaries: On its 2021 debut, Eternal Blue, which has earned 230,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate, the band supplemented bone-crunching riffs with hints of synth-pop, prog rock and R&B. The 36-year-old LaPlante, who’s adept at guttural screaming as well as soulful crooning, drives that diverse palette.
Trending on Billboard
“She’s an encyclopedia of music in general,” says Mike Stringer, Spiritbox’s guitarist and LaPlante’s husband, a few minutes before LaPlante gushes about the latest FKA twigs album and Kate Bush’s back catalog. “We’ve always had this open-door policy of, ‘If we enjoy it and it’s catchy, we’ll probably release it.’ ”
Tsunami Sea, the band’s long-awaited second album, does indeed feature some of its biggest hooks to date as well as some of the group’s most thrash-ready moments, often in the same song. Released March 7 on Pale Chord/Rise Records, the album arrives on a wave of hype, with two consecutive Grammy Award nods for best metal performance and all three of the album’s prerelease tracks — the blistering “Soft Spine,” melodic “Perfect Soul” and electro-tinged “No Loss, No Love” — cracking the top 20 of Hot Hard Rock Songs.
The act opened for bands like Korn, Shinedown and Papa Roach over the past two years but was also tapped by Megan Thee Stallion to remix her song “Cobra” in 2023. Most importantly, manager Jason Mageau says, “They’ve spent the past few years figuring out who they are.”
Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox performs at Alexandra Palace on Feb. 13, 2025 in London.
Alex Bemis
Rising from the ashes of metal group Iwrestledabearonce in 2017, Spiritbox — whose lineup also includes bassist Josh Gilbert and drummer Zev Rosenberg — spent its first four years weathering personnel changes and gathering early singles for EP releases. While the 2020 singles “Blessed Be” and “Holy Roller” went viral online, the pandemic upended the rollout for Eternal Blue, including touring. “At that moment in time, they had played under 10 shows together,” Mageau says. “So we really took our time building that live show, taking some support opportunities and learning from them.”
Spiritbox released two more EPs, 2022’s Rotoscope and 2023’s The Fear of Fear, to tide over fans who were eager for new material as the band played hard rock tours and festivals. Tsunami Sea took roughly two years to write and complete during gaps in that touring schedule, with 30 song ideas whittled down to the most cohesive 11-track project the group could make.
“It was a very intense process near the end, but I think I had a lot more fun writing for this record than I did Eternal Blue,” Stringer says, “and I feel like it has more of an identity to it.” Because the album follows a more extensive touring history, Spiritbox finished the new songs with a better understanding of how they might translate onstage and more consideration of LaPlante’s live vocals. “We know ourselves musically, as we’re getting older and discovering more about what we can actually achieve,” she says. “For the first time now, when we write stuff, I feel confident. It [only] took 20 years.”
LaPlante
Alex Bemis
After performing some prerelease shows in Europe, Spiritbox will begin a spring global headlining tour on April 3 in Dallas and then join Linkin Park for select stadium shows in the summer. When asked about commercial goals for Tsunami Sea — considering that Eternal Blue peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, its follow-up could become the band’s first 10 entry — Mageau shrugs off anything empirical.
“I really want them to just be themselves. They’ve been a support band for two years — let’s show them what we’re made of,” he says. “It’s been all about finding new areas to insert our band into mainstream conversations and try to bring more women into the space, too. When this band first started, the female listenership on Spotify would be, like, 10%. Now we’re in the 30% range of women listening to the band, and [LaPlante] wants that to increase even more.”
For her part, LaPlante says that being among the fast-rising women in metal is a galvanizing force for a band trying to turn its expanding audiences into safe spaces. “I love the fact that I see all different ages and genders at our shows and kids presenting in any way they want,” she says. “They’re not there because I’m a woman and they’re not there despite me being a woman. They all just heard our siren call and we found each other.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.