Holy Roller

Courtney LaPlante's voice is the instrument everything else is built around here, and it operates on a wider dynamic range than almost any vocalist in contemporary heavy music. The song opens with a spare, almost devotional guitar figure before it ruptures into djent-adjacent polyrhythms — the kind of downtuned, metrically unpredictable riffing that requires both technical precision and physical commitment to execute at this tempo. What makes this track remarkable is not the heaviness itself but the contrast: LaPlante moves from soft, almost liturgical singing into full-throated screaming within the same phrase, and neither mode sounds like an imposition on the other. The lyrics take religious language and put it to critical use, examining the psychology of zealotry and performance — the kind of faith that is really theater, the conviction that is really control dressed in spiritual costume. The production has a modern sheen but with analog warmth in the low-mids that gives the guitars a physicality lacking in more clinically produced metal. There's a showmanship here that is entirely self-aware: the song knows it's a spectacle, and that self-awareness is part of what it's saying. This is music for the gym, for the commute when you need something that matches the speed of your internal monologue, for anyone who has ever watched someone perform certainty and felt the performance more than they felt the conviction.