The Amity Affliction: “This is the first album where I feel like we made it back”

Joel Birch sits cross-legged on the floor as he speaks to Kerrang!. At 44, a time when the joints start working against you, it’s pretty good going.

There was a period when this feat was impossible. Joel vividly remembers when he seriously injured his knee, because how could he forget? It was less than two weeks after the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, when there was a desire to continue with gigs in the French capital, as an act of perseverance in the face of the barbarism that stole 130 lives – 90 of them at an Eagles Of Death Metal show at the Bataclan.

During Amity’s appearance at the La Machine Du Moulin Rouge venue 12 days later, Joel got up close and personal with his audience, singing in faces as a display of unity, when an overzealous fan caught up in the moment pulled Joel by the arm, jarring his leg awkwardly.

There was a time, too, when Joel wasn’t a very flexible interviewee. This K! writer last spoke to him in 2017, for a series of monthly interviews with Joel and then-bandmate, bassist and clean vocalist Ahren Stringer. While the 12 conversations yielded insights, begrudgingly, Joel was consistently quiet and distant, never letting familiarity go beyond surface-level exchanges. Sometimes the pauses between questions and answers were so long that it was occasionally necessary to check the calls hadn’t been disconnected. Reminded of what a tough nut he was to crack back then, Joel knows exactly why.

“I dare say I was still drinking,” he suggests, tucking his long hair behind silvery temples. “I’m a completely different human being now.”

And he’s right – the reticent, serious dude of almost a decade ago has been replaced by someone more buoyant, more willing to articulate his thoughts and feelings, and more prone to laughter while discussing The Amity Affliction’s ninth album, House Of Cards. He cracks up, for instance, when K! identifies the sample at the beginning of new song Kickboxer as being from the 1994 film, The Mask.

How, then, did that quote, delivered by Cameron Diaz (“All I wanted was a kiss… just one…”) end up prefacing a brutalising track called Kickboxer? Turns out it’s another film connection, this time courtesy of Amity’s guitarist and sometime producer.

“That’s the mind of Dan Brown,” says Joel of his bandmate. “Kickboxer is named after the [1989] Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, which features a hilarious dance scene. That scene comes just after a bit where he’s having a drink called ‘The kiss of death’. I walked through the bus lounge when we were on tour and Dan’s watching the movie. I got a text from him while I was out that said, ‘Can you put the words kiss of death into a song?’ I dismissed it initially, then I got back to my bunk later, where I generally write most of my lyrics on the Notes app. I typed in ‘kiss of death’ then some other things to see if anything came of it. I’d had a conversation with a friend and she’d said sometimes she feels betrayed by life, which I’d also written down. I had these two things that I started fleshing out and it all eventually slotted together. Dan wanted to call the song Kiss Of Death, but we weren’t going to do that!”

Dan Brown has been a full-time member of Amity since 2013, having joined as a touring member the year before. As well as requesting lyrics inspired by ’80s martial arts movies, he provided support to the band after Ahren suffered burnout making 2012’s Chasing Ghosts, an album Ahren spearheaded creatively from the ground up. It’s a way of working that rankled Joel long as far back as the making of their second album, 2010’s Youngbloods.

“I stopped re-reading my lyrics, because I was getting so upset,” Joel admits of handing over his most personal insights, dispatches from a disparaging mind exploring depression, addiction and suicidal ideation, only for Ahren to set them to music prescriptively, right down to the phrasing of Joel’s vocals.

“I’m like everyone else with depression or bipolar or anxiety, and I tend to take very practical things to heart,” continues Joel. “It was very mechanical. By the time we got to recording, all my creative input was gone. Ahren would record a talking track of my lyrics in the song, the way I’m meant to sing it. By the time I’d be in the vocal booth, it was fucked, it wasn’t fun for me. The studio part has always been stressful. There’s always been tension. The environment within bands can become very hostile.”

There had been fraying within the ranks, then, but to the outside world things were working – until they weren’t. In February of last year, Ahren, by then the only remaining founding member of the Queensland band, was fired. Admittedly, it had been brewing for a while. The previous May, he was kicked off Amity’s North American tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of 2014’s Let The Ocean Take Me, ‘in the best interest of [his] mental health and wellbeing.’ Speculation was rife in the months that followed, until they issued a statement confirming that Ahren was out, as it was ‘impossible to tolerate certain behaviours that have been directed at ourselves and those close to us.’ Ahren would be replaced by Jonathan Reeves in a touring capacity in 2024, and on a permanent basis last year.

Regardless of what Ahren’s behaviours were, you do have to wonder how the hell Amity got this far. With Joel’s obvious hatred of recording, historically at least, and Ahren suggesting in a recent YouTube interview he’s never enjoyed touring, is it any wonder things turned out the way they did?

“I’m not going to talk about anything he said,” replies Joel, reluctant to say much about his former bandmate outside of how his departure has affected things. “Nothing’s changed as far as how the band is run. Or how the music is written in any meaningful way.”

Joel is more comfortable discussing the ways in which he himself has changed, and how that’s got him to a place where he’s less willing to compromise on his sobriety and his vision. “Over two decades, you really change as a person. I stopped drinking, and it was a drastic departure from how I was previously and it’s only become more drastic. That’s the nature of things.”

Some things, however, haven’t changed enough. House Of Cards’ title-track features the lyric ‘you’ve got to try and love yourself’, though Joel isn’t as far along on that journey as his advocacy suggests.

“I’m doing so badly with that. Failing miserably, but trying,” he offers with a smile. “It’s do as I say, not as I do. That’s the battle, isn’t it? That’s why the line’s in there.”

Joel describes two incidents, one old and one new, that illustrate a paradox in his life – as a man mistreated by the woman who gave birth to him, yet adored and understood by complete strangers.

The first was from 11 years ago, when his late mother attended an Amity show at Brisbane’s Riverstage, an outdoor venue in lush botanical gardens, located on a bend of the city’s waterway.

After the performance, mum appeared in tears. Thinking she was overcome with pride, Joel hugged her, only for her to callously ask when he’d be returning to his studies so he can have a proper career, as if the music was a fad – much to her son’s chagrin, given that Amity had been a band for more than a decade at that point and just performed in front of 10,000 people.

“It’s hard to be the child of a parent who just shits on you your whole life,” says Joel of life for him, his brother and sister, who he wrote the standalone single All That I Remember for. “All three of us thought that the other two had a better relationship with [our mother]. Then when she died, we all realised, ‘Oh, she was making us all feel like shit.’ I guess she wanted us to fight for her favour or something, while making us all feel like we could never be enough.”

The aforementioned line ‘you’ve got to try and love yourself’ was therefore written for Joel’s siblings, as a way of reminding them they are enough and always have been. It also came about following particularly cynical response to the release of All That I Remember. In a sea of comments on social media praising the track, Joel managed to zero in on the negative one, as if panning for shit amidst clusters of gold. Despite the track being unveiled 10 months ago, the commenter’s suggestion they’d hoped to hear something more ‘upbeat’ from the band still irks the singer – not that there’s anything he can, or wants to, do about it. And the same goes for the raft of abusive messages the band received when Ahren’s departure was announced.

“Ronnie Radke is a powerhouse of shit-talking,” Joel says of the often controversial Falling In Reverse frontman. “He’s relentless, and you can either do that or do nothing – I don’t feel there’s a middle ground and that’s depressing. Because people have access to me, I now have to have access to every fucking thought they have about me. I hate it. Because, you know what? That comment is right, but I’m fucking miserable – I don’t know what to tell you. I’m dealing with this daily. People say to me, ‘You call yourself a mental health advocate?’ No, I’m not advocating for anything. I’ve got a problem and I don’t appreciate it, but here I am.”

The second incident that highlights Joel’s paradoxical life, meanwhile, occurred just four days before this chat. At a show in Adelaide, amid the chaos surveyed from the stage, he caught sight of one man in particular – his eyes closed and his arms held up, experiencing the kind of rhapsody generally associated with religious devotion or narcotic intoxication. In this case, he’d simply been taken by the music.

“I look at things like that and I think, ‘How do you beat that? That’s the human response that I live for. That gives me purpose.”

Just then, Joel’s 10-year-old son appears to tell his dad that dinner’s ready. He’s got two older stepsons too, aged 22 and 25, so gets to experience a broad range of life experience at close-quarters, while righting the wrongs of his own upbringing. Whatever the anxieties of his past, and the frustrations associated with past Amity releases, it’s evident that House Of Cards is an album Joel is immensely proud of. As well he should be, as it’s a beast of a record, musically pulverising and intensely personal in its insights – chasing who they used to be rather than the trends they, like many metalcore bands, got preoccupied with in recent years.

“This is the first album where I feel like we made it back,” admits Joel. “Now we can take it even more in the direction of Let The Ocean Take Me-ish Amity. I feel really comfortable with it, and I feel confident. I don’t know if I’m confident in the way that it will be a success, but I’m confident we wrote the best record we could.”

House Of Cards is out now via Pure Noise.

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