Metal Goes Mainstream: Has Spiritbox's Grammys Performance Normalised Metal Music?
Image Credit: Andreas Lawen via Wikimedia Commons
This year, Spiritbox (a metal band fronted by Courtney LaPlante) opened the 2026 Grammys with a live rendition of their hit single “Soft Spine” off their latest album “Tsunami Sea”, having performed the song a year earlier on Jimmy Kimmel Live. These recent broadcasts mark yet another insertion of metal culture into the mainstream.
In July 2024, French metal band Gojira became the first metal band to perform at an Olympic Games, as they graced the stage of the Opening Ceremony for the Paris Summer Olympics, playing “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça Ira)”, featuring opera singer Marina Viotti. Later that year in November, Knocked Loose made headlines, playing live on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
The metal community has sung high praise for all of these performances. On Spiritbox, Scott Penfold for loadedradio.com opined that this performance “put metal back on the broadcast”. On Gojira, Matt Mills wrote for Metal Hammer: “Gojira at the Olympics was the most important moment for metal this century”. However, the screaming, distorted guitars and black attire upset some members of the public. One particularly out-of-touch parent demanded apologies from Kimmel for causing their son to break down “in tears”. In spite of the backlash,a metal concert is - in my opinion - one of the most welcoming environments there is (Exhibit A: crowdsurfing wheelchair at an In Flames gig).
In my eyes, these daring performances in front of non-metalheads are exactly what the current metal scene needs: a protest against mainstream music lovers, allowing metal to stand tall amongst other genres. For too long, metal has remained niche - a genre grossly misunderstood by outsiders as edgy or quirky (or worse still, “not musical”), and these performances bring metal into mainstream conversation.
Interestingly, similar criticism was once applied to everyone’s favourite national treasure, The Beatles. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote for the Boston Globe in 1964: “They [The Beatles] are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music”. Make no mistake, I’m not saying Spiritbox are the next Beatles - not merely because Spiritbox are Canadian and The Beatles obvious Scousers! Yet this instance of repeated history may suggest that the beauty of music, in all its forms, can only be appreciated when we stop the gatekeeping of music that doesn’t meet the clinical mainstream definition.
Despite Spiritbox’s historically significant Grammy performance, the underrepresentation of the genre is still clear to see. There exists just one Grammy metal award - the Best Metal Performance. The size of the largest metal festivals, the strongly worded opinions shared amongst the metal community, and the passion of the fanbase warrants more. More awards, more mainstream performances, more tolerance and acceptance of metal, instead of animosity.
I’m glad Spiritbox were able to perform on such an important platform amongst musical “royalty”, and I’m glad metal music was able to stretch its devil horn-shaped claws further out into the public. But, I fear this still isn’t enough. The stigma attached to the metal community remains powerful enough to discourage greater public representation. More is yet to be done, before one can definitely say metal has been normalised in the public eye.