Why Spiritbox Gets a Partial Pass

Spiritbox should be everything I avoid: polished metalcore with algorithm-friendly dynamics, a pristine production sheen that turns feeling into product. Their records sound engineered for maximum legibility—scream, clean, breakdown, repeat. Every element that usually disqualifies a band from my collection is right here, gleaming. And yet, they remain.

That contradiction nags at me. On paper, they violate nearly every tenet of my curatorial ethic: over-compressed guitars that refuse to breathe, pop-adjacent choruses that mistake clarity for catharsis, and the unmistakable scent of playlist optimization. It's music built to survive the scroll. But every time I hover over the delete key, something catches—a momentary shiver where all that polish cracks and something living peers through.

The Problem

What makes Spiritbox difficult isn't just their polish—it's the memory of what they used to sound like. The self-titled EP and the Singles Collection carried a kind of spectral honesty: abstract lyricism that hinted at wounds rather than explaining them, riffs that shimmered with unease instead of resolution. Those early songs felt like communion through static, melodic dissonance haunted by sincerity. Every scream bloomed like an ache, and even the clean passages trembled with something unresolved. They were heavy in a way that refused to flatter you.

Then came Eternal Blue and beyond, where that tension began to smooth out. The mix grew brighter, the choruses safer, the edges sanded for streaming. What once sounded like devotion started to sound like design. "Heavy became digestible" feels almost literal—their fear of alienation audible in every immaculate production choice. They learned how to please, and in doing so, unlearned how to haunt.

Where They Succeed

Even as Eternal Blue gleams brighter than its predecessors, parts of it still remember the dark. "Sun Killer" opens with the old atmosphere—weight suspended in air, melody moving like fog. It's cleaner now, yes, but the intent is still there: to summon something vast and mournful rather than to perform heaviness.

"Halcyon," though, is where the spark truly lingers. The song moves with the patience of a requiem, each riff collapsing inward, each vocal line quivering between control and surrender. The lyrics—half abstraction, half confession—feel like they could've belonged to the Singles Collection era. There's still dissonance humming in the background, a ghost of that earlier static that refuses to die out completely.

Even "The Summit," "Silk in the Strings," and the title track hold glimmers of that sincerity. They're songs where the mix still breathes, where space and silence are allowed to wound. You can sense a band caught mid-mutation, trying to reconcile the purity of what once was with the visibility they've earned. The polish hasn't yet devoured the pulse; it just coats it. And sometimes, when Courtney's voice cracks or the guitars surge a little too far into the red, the façade flickers—proof that sincerity can survive, if barely, inside the machine.

The Partial Pass

Spiritbox remains in my collection, whole but weighed. Eternal Blue still plays front to back; I don't pick and choose. There are no bad songs here—only degrees of resonance. The record lives as a complete gesture, a document of a band crossing from ache into artifice. What changes is how I listen: not everything holds the same temperature. The singles that drew the spotlight—"Circle With Me," "Holy Roller"—burn bright but brief for me. They're engineered peaks. The deeper tracks—"Halcyon," "The Summit," "Silk in the Strings," "Sun Killer," "Eternal Blue"—are where the ember still glows underneath the gloss.

So the "partial pass" isn't about exclusion; it's about calibration. Spiritbox stays, but the listening shifts from immersion to study. I hear them now through two lenses: the sincerity of their earlier self and the precision of who they've become. The tension between those versions is the devotion—the friction that keeps the music from dissolving into background. Keeping Eternal Blue in full rotation is a way of honoring that struggle. It's not forgiveness. It's observation.

Closing

Granting Spiritbox a partial pass doesn't weaken my framework; it tests it. Devotional weight was never meant to be purity—only presence. Sometimes that presence flickers in unexpected places, even beneath a sheen of accessibility. Eternal Blue reminds me that authenticity isn't a fixed quality but a pressure that either expands or collapses under attention. When I keep the record in rotation, I'm not excusing its polish; I'm tracing where the pulse still beats through it.

Curation isn't about purity. It's about noticing when sincerity endures against its environment. Spiritbox, for all their gloss, still let the human slip through. That counts for something. Their exception lives beside their decline in the archive as a reminder: polish can't kill devotion outright—it can only muffle it. And sometimes, even through that layer of glass, you can still hear the sound of someone trying to mean it.