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Darkness has always had a place in rock music, whether through eerie soundscapes, violent stories, paranoia, despair, or the supernatural. Some of rock’s most unforgettable songs work because they are willing to go into places that are uncomfortable, frightening, or emotionally devastating. The songs on this list take different paths into that darkness. Some deal with real violence or death, while others create fear through atmosphere, storytelling, or psychological tension. Together they show how powerful rock music can be when it turns away from celebration and heads straight into the shadows. # 10 – In My Darkest Hour – Megadeth
Spiritbox have been nominated for Best Metal Performance at the Grammys three years running, which is a sentence that would have sounded ridiculous when Courtney LaPlante and Mike Stringer started posting songs from a house in Victoria, British Columbia with no label, no booking agent and no live band.
They have since put out two albums, three EPs, a run of standalone singles and a brand new song in September, and the catalogue is now deep enough that any honest ranking is going to annoy somebody. This one counts down from twenty-five. It draws from every era, it does not treat the early material as a warm-up act, and the top five is where the arguing starts.
How A Bedroom Project Became A Grammy Band
The origin matters because it explains the sound.
Spiritbox formed in 2017 after LaPlante and Stringer — married, and both out of the band Iwrestledabearonce — moved to Vancouver Island and started making music with no plan to tour it. No pressure to be marketable, no producer in the room, nobody telling them a song needed a chorus at ninety seconds.
What came out of that is a band with an unusually wide range for something filed under metalcore. Stringer writes riffs that are genuinely technical without being showy about it, and LaPlante has one of the most versatile voices in heavy music right now — she can do the airy clean thing and a genuinely frightening low bellow, frequently inside the same bar, and she never makes it sound like a party trick.
The engine of the catalogue is contrast. Nearly every song on this list works by putting something beautiful directly beside something ugly and refusing to smooth the join.
Their bassist Bill Crook, who played on the band’s rise through Eternal Blue and the EPs, died in July 2024. Josh Gilbert has held the position since, with Zev Rose on drums.
What Is The Heaviest Spiritbox Song?
The short answer is ‘Cellar Door’, and it isn’t especially close.
It’s the most technical thing they’ve recorded, built on the heaviest seven-string work in the catalogue, and the low end of it is genuinely oppressive in a way the rest of the Fear of Fear EP isn’t. The Recording Academy agreed enough to nominate it.
The two behind it are ‘Yellowjacket’, which pairs a dissonant riff with Sam Carter of Architects and spends three minutes doing nothing but hitting you, and ‘Fata Morgana’, the Tsunami Sea opener, which is the most aggressive thing on that record by a distance.
If what you want is sheer weight rather than technicality, go to ‘Yellowjacket’ first.
What Is Spiritbox’s Most Popular Song?
‘Circle With Me’ is the streaming answer — it’s their most-played track by a wide margin and the one that took them from a band the internet liked to a band on festival posters.
‘Holy Roller’ is the cultural answer. It’s the video everybody saw, it’s the song that got them signed, and it’s still the one that goes off hardest live.
If you’re looking for a way in, start with ‘Circle With Me’ and then go straight to ‘Holy Roller’. If you only like one of them you probably won’t like the band; if you like both, the rest of this list is for you.
Buried on The Fear of Fear behind three much louder songs, which is why most people missed it. It’s the most straightforwardly melodic thing on the EP and LaPlante sings almost all of it, and there’s a case that it’s the best-written song of that entire cycle.
24. Hysteria
From the Rotoscope EP, and the most nakedly electronic the band have gone. Programmed drums, industrial texture, a vocal that’s processed within an inch of itself. It shouldn’t work next to the rest of the catalogue. It absolutely does, and it opened a door they’ve walked through repeatedly since.
23. Under My Skin
A June 2026 collaboration with electronic producers Slander and Vastive, and the furthest outside the band’s own lane they’ve stepped. It is not a Spiritbox song in the way the other twenty-four are — it’s a crossover single built for a different room entirely — but LaPlante is unmistakably herself on it, and the fact that it works at all says something about how portable that voice is. Included because it’s part of the story of 2026, not because it belongs any higher.
22. Mourning
Released 7 September 2026, so it’s the newest thing here and the ranking is provisional by definition. First impressions: it’s restrained, it leans into the atmospheric side rather than the heavy one, and it suggests whatever comes next is going to be a different record again. Ask me in a year.
21. Ride The Wave
Five minutes long, which for this band is close to an epic, and it earns every second. The back half of Tsunami Sea is where the album stops chasing singles and starts building, and this is the centerpiece of that stretch.
20. Tsunami Sea
The title track, and the thematic anchor of the whole record — the idea of being overwhelmed by something enormous and impersonal, which LaPlante has written about repeatedly and never better than here. Josh Gilbert’s backing vocals are all over it and they change the texture noticeably.
19. Halcyon
Deep cut from Eternal Blue and a permanent fixture on the “underrated Spiritbox song” lists that circulate every few months. Those lists are right.
18. Eternal Blue
The title track, and the most emotionally direct song on the album that isn’t ‘Constance’. It’s also the clearest demonstration of what LaPlante does that nobody else quite does — the switch between registers happens mid-phrase and you don’t hear the seam.
17. Fata Morgana
The opening track on Tsunami Sea and the single heaviest thing on it. Opening an album with your most aggressive song is a statement about what the record is going to be, and it makes the melodic turns later on land much harder.
16. Secret Garden
The song that told everybody Eternal Blue was going to be more than a heavy record. Released as a single in May 2021, almost no screaming, enormous chorus, and it brought in an audience who’d never have found ‘Holy Roller’ on their own.
15. Sun Killer
The album opener, and a deliberately strange choice for one — it builds slowly, holds back, and doesn’t hand you a hook until it’s ready. A band with less confidence puts ‘Circle With Me’ first. This is better.
14. The Void
The high-octane one. Relentless guitar, a chorus built for a field, and no ideas above its station — it exists to do one job and it does it at maximum volume. The best song on The Fear of Fear for a crowd, if not on a record.
13 – Perfect Soul
The lead single from Tsunami Sea, and the most shoegaze-adjacent thing in the catalogue — the guitars wash rather than chug, and the chorus is built for a room with a roof on it. It also landed on the NHL 26 soundtrack, which is its own kind of arrival.
12 – Rule Of Nines
A 2019 standalone single, from before almost anybody was listening. The title refers to the medical method of estimating burn surface area, which tells you what the lyric is about. It moves from an atmospheric verse into a riff that genuinely pounds, and it’s the clearest early evidence that this band had something.
11 – Blessed Be
Released in 2020 and one of the most technically layered things they’ve recorded. The production has an almost ASMR quality in the quiet passages before the syncopation arrives and flattens it. A song that rewards headphones and punishes phone speakers.
10 – No Loss, No Love
Under three minutes, djent-adjacent, and the drumming is the story — it shifts underneath the riff constantly and never settles. There are cyberpunk textures and electronic interludes threaded through it that would have sounded like a gimmick on Eternal Blue and sound completely natural here.
9 – Hurt You
Written during a 2020 snowstorm and it sounds like it — there’s a cold, still quality to the verses that the eerie synth line makes worse in the best way. Lyrically it’s about toxic codependency and it doesn’t let either party off.
8 – Rotoscope
The pivot. Industrial, digital, danceable, and openly indebted to Nine Inch Nails and nineties alt-rock rather than anything from the metalcore world. Releasing this as the title track of a standalone EP rather than burying it on an album was a statement: we are not going to make Eternal Blue again.
7 – Circle With Me
Their biggest song by streams and the one that broke them — north of a hundred million plays and counting. The construction is the trick: a chorus that could be on daytime radio, and a bridge that goes somewhere genuinely extreme, joined so cleanly that people who don’t normally like heavy music get all the way through it without noticing what happened to them.
6. Soft Spine
Nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 2026 Grammys — the band’s third nomination in three consecutive years, after ‘Jaded’ and ‘Cellar Door’.
Three minutes, no fat on it, and one of the most efficient things they’ve written. It’s the shortest song on Tsunami Sea and it does more in that time than most bands manage in five. The Recording Academy has now nominated Spiritbox three years running and this is arguably the strongest of the three performances.
5 – Constance
The hardest song on this list to write about. LaPlante wrote it for her grandmother Phyllis, who had dementia, and at her family’s request there are no screams anywhere in it. That constraint is what makes it devastating — there’s no release valve, no point where the song lets you off, just four minutes of controlled grief. It’s the best thing she’s ever sung and it’s the song people cry to at shows.
4 – Yellowjacket
Three minutes of bludgeoning built on a riff that genuinely stings, which is about as on-the-nose as a title gets and it’s earned. Sam Carter of Architects guests, and the decision to bring in another vocalist on a record where LaPlante can already do everything says something about how specifically this song was designed.
3 – Jaded
Grammy-nominated, Best Metal Performance, 2024 — the first of the three.
Disillusionment as a subject, eerie stacked harmonies as a method, and a level of energy the studio recording somehow doesn’t blunt. This is the song that made the wider industry pay attention rather than just the metal press.
2 – Cellar Door
Grammy-nominated, Best Metal Performance, 2025.
The most visceral and the most technical thing in the catalogue. The seven-string work on it is the heaviest they’ve committed to tape, and the production keeps it legible when a lesser mix would turn it to mud. It’s not the most accessible Spiritbox song and it isn’t trying to be — it’s what the band sounds like with nothing sanded off.
1 – Holy Roller
Born out of a cancelled tour and the specific fury that comes with it.
‘Holy Roller’ is the densest and most dynamically volatile song they’ve made — it lurches between registers, it never sits still, and the video did the rest. It is the reason most people reading this know who Spiritbox are, and four albums and EPs later nothing has knocked it off. The catalogue has got more sophisticated, more melodic, more ambitious and in places heavier. It has not produced a better three and a half minutes than this.
Three Grammy nominations in three years. Eternal Blue hit number thirteen on the Billboard 200 and number one on both US rock charts. Tsunami Sea reached twenty-six on the Billboard 200, three on UK Rock and Metal, and number one on the UK Independent chart.
They’re also expanding sideways rather than just upwards — ‘Under My Skin’ in June 2026 was a collaboration with electronic acts Slander and Vastive, which is not a move most metalcore bands would make or get away with. LaPlante has turned up on other people’s songs constantly, including live with Knocked Loose, and she’s a permanent fixture near the top of any conversation about the best female-fronted metal bands working today or the best female-fronted bands full stop.
In genre terms they sit alongside Lorna Shore and Bad Omens at the front of the current wave — the bands doing the most to drag modern metalcore somewhere it hasn’t been, and the reason the last decade of metalcore albums reads so differently from the decade before it. If you came to them through the melodic end, the baddiecore scene is the adjacent rabbit hole.
FAQ Section
What is the best Spiritbox song?
‘Holy Roller’. It’s the most dynamically volatile thing they’ve recorded, it’s the song that broke them after a cancelled tour in 2020, and nothing in the four releases since has displaced it.
What is the heaviest Spiritbox song?
‘Cellar Door’, from The Fear of Fear. It’s the most technical track in the catalogue and features the heaviest seven-string guitar work they’ve recorded. ‘Yellowjacket’ and ‘Fata Morgana’ are close behind.
What is Spiritbox’s most popular song?
‘Circle With Me’ is their most-streamed track by a significant margin, with over 100 million plays. ‘Holy Roller’ is the more culturally recognisable song and the one most associated with their breakthrough.
Have Spiritbox been nominated for a Grammy?
Yes, three years running in the Best Metal Performance category — ‘Jaded’ in 2024, ‘Cellar Door’ in 2025 and ‘Soft Spine’ in 2026.
Who are the members of Spiritbox?
Courtney LaPlante on vocals, Mike Stringer on guitar, Josh Gilbert on bass and Zev Rose on drums. LaPlante and Stringer founded the band in Victoria, British Columbia in 2017. Former bassist Bill Crook, who played through the Eternal Blue era, died in July 2024.
Twenty-five songs and somebody is going to be furious about the top five. Tell us in the comments what’s ranked too low, which deep cut got left out, and whether ‘Soft Spine’ should be a lot higher than fourteen. Follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
Slipknot are teasing a mystery announcement – and it looks like being revealed imminently .
Iconic London venue Wembley Stadium posted an image of the band’s logo together with the date .09.28.26 on its official Instagram page. The post also features the words:“If you’re 555…” – a lyrics from the band’s classic 2001 song The Heretic Anthem.
While there are no clues as to what the announcement is about, the date – September 28 – suggests it will be revealed tomorrow (Monday).
Earlier this week, cryptic Slipknot posters appeared across Euopre, North, Central and South America, possibly hinting at a new tour from the Iowa nu metal outfit.
Posters promoting the masked band have been spotted in at least 10 cities in the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina and posted onto social media.
They feature the URL unlock.slipknot1.com, which leads to a website urging users to input their details, then displays the date 09.28 – the same date as the Wembley post.
While the signs point to a tour, there has been other activity in the Slipknot world in the last few weeks. The band recently returned with their polarising single Arsenal, while guitarist Jim Root says that they have been working with Faith No More and Slayer producer Matt Wallace.
Arsenal was the first song the band released following the departure of longtime DJ Sid Wilson earlier this month and percussionist Craig Jones in 2023, as well as the first song they’ve released since drummer Eloy Casagrande replaced Jay Weinberg in 2024.
Last night, Leslie Feist, who has built a fantastic legacy as part of Broken Social Scene and with her solo music as Feist, was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame at Massey Hall in Toronto, ON, Canada. The night also honoured ’80s rock band the Tragically Hip, Mike Reno and Paul Dean of rock band Loverboy, and pop singer-songwriter Roch Voisine.
Bronx Soul Collective’s Get To Know Me settles into a smooth modern soul and neo R&B space, balancing warm grooves with polished contemporary production. The track has an intimate, late night character, with the soulful delivery keeping the focus on connection, attraction and the desire to let someone closer. There is an easy flow to the arrangement, allowing the rhythm and vocal melodies to work together without feeling overly busy. Bronx Soul Collective bring a classic sense of soul storytelling into a more modern setting, giving the track both warmth and a clean contemporary edge. Get To Know Me feels relaxed but emotionally present, with enough groove to keep it moving while maintaining its intimate atmosphere. It is a confident introduction to the project’s sound, built around smooth vocals, understated sensuality and a rhythm that settles in naturally.
Smooth soul, late night energy and a little room to get closer.
Rhiannon Giddens has spent much of her career expanding the commonly told history of American folk music, particularly the role Black musicians played in shaping it. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers continues that work while emphasizing ensemble performance and songs connected to North Carolina. Odetta’s 1956 debut, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues, offers a useful earlier reference point. Both records mix interpretation with a strong sense of ownership over the material.
