After the death of his estranged mother in July 2024, trauma from Joel Birch’s childhood home flooded back to The Amity Affliction vocalist. As the Queensland metalcore stalwarts announce their ninth LP House Of Cards, he tells K! about challenging motherhood as a “sacred space in society”, and realising he still needed that nugget of optimism…
“I’m not particularly invested in being an ‘Australian band’,” begins Joel Birch, “and I felt this overwhelming sense of pride when I saw Parkway Drive walk out.” Four months ago, Joel was watching the Byron Bay crushers’ mind-boggling 20th anniversary tour unfold around European arenas, after opening the bill with his band, The Amity Affliction. Having Sydney deathcore outfit Thy Art Is Murder in tow made this triple-stacker the biggest overseas tour in Aussie metal history.
Three hours north of Parkway’s home is the Sunshine Coast, where Joel lives with his wife and son. His 2026 began snowboarding and visiting Beyblade stores in Japan, seizing some downtime before Amity gear up for their grand return. Today (February 5), the metalcore veterans have announced their ninth album, House Of Cards, and unveiled its title-track.
Recorded across two weeks in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, the LP is also their first since the departure of long-serving member Ahren Stringer, officially replaced by Jonny Reeves on bass and clean vocals. In an exclusive interview, Joel tells Kerrang! why the album is inspired by his troubled relationship with his mother, resulting in a metaphor for his childhood home where things “could collapse at any time”...
As you announce House Of Cards, how does the feeling compare to the previous eight times you’ve released an album?
“Everything from [2018’s] Misery onwards, I've been pretty anxious about. This one, I'm probably the least anxious about, maybe because we've been sitting on it for ages. I've shown a bunch of friends, and we actually made sure that everyone in our crew – we’re only missing one person – is on the record, doing gang vocals. That’s the special thing: it's a group effort. I think it's the best one since [2014’s] Let The Ocean Take Me, and I'm sticking to that.”
How far along the process did the album title come into existence?
“My mum died in July 2024, and we didn't have a good relationship. She was not a great mother. I had a couple of lines that I'd written, but the original was something like, ‘You grew up in a stable home / I grew up in a house of cards’ – one of the first things I'd written about the entire thing that was emblematic of my housing situation.
“It was stressful. It did feel like things could collapse at any time. There was a lot of emotional abuse, physical abuse, and it's strange, because when you go through it, you're comparing what you experience to all the other horror stories you hear. I grew up thinking my life was pretty normal. You go through your formative years, start discussing your childhood with your peers – even having kids can bring it up – and [you realise], ‘It's bad.’ The whole album grows from that concept. It felt like the right title, even though the lines that birthed the idea aren't even on the album.”
You released a standalone single last May, All That I Remember, exploring your relationship with your mother. Did that open the door for what you wanted to say?
“It's not [on the album], but the kick-off point was that song. That's when she died, and the way she died was extremely fucked-up. She drank herself to death and had massive organ failure, cancer, fluid build-up, and at the end, she was losing three kilos a day for a sustained period. I've got a brother and a sister. She cut us off two weeks before she died, and told the hospital not to give us health updates. It was super fucked-up. I wrote [All That I Remember] about it, and I was like, ‘Really, that's just skimming the surface of the broader experience.’ The song House Of Cards is for my brother and sister as much as it is for me.”
Would you say the young child in the House Of Cards video represents your siblings just as much as your younger self?
“I spoke with Dan Daly, who's done a bunch of our videos, and he had a pretty similar childhood. The kid purges himself of his mother by the end of the clip. The reference for all the stuff coming out of his mouth was actually – this is funny – [1999 film] The Mummy. The whole thing is about trying to find shelter, unsuccessfully. Also, I think anyone that's been raised by an absent parent can relate to the TV being there a lot of the time. That's the strongest reference I can put there. For me, it was bodyboarding, volleyball, skating and swimming – anything to keep me away from my home.
“The whole thing is trying to examine this idea we have in society, which is well-founded for the most part, that a mother is supposed to [represent] safety and nurture. When you have a mother that is not nurturing, gentle or safe, but abusive and an alcoholic, it's confusing. That’s an overarching theme within the record. This sacred space in society, motherhood. What does it look like for the people who are affected by it when it's not that? It can fuck you up.”
The breakdown lands with the line, ‘Hate is easy / You’ve gotta try and love yourself.’ Why was that important to leave as the lasting message from House Of Cards?
“I remember reading comments about All That I Remember – to my own detriment – and seeing someone say, ‘I hope there's something a bit more hopeful on this one. There hasn't been anything hopeful in a long time.’ And that was a conscious decision, because I [didn’t] feel hopeful. I was sick of trying to put a ribbon on things. I read that and thought about my relationship to songs where I experience similar emotional attachments… what do I take from them? There are a good deal of songs I listen to because I want to hear a little bit of happiness in it.
“Out of all the comments I'm reading, why did that one stick out to me? Well, I need it right now. I've had a lot happen in my life, and a lot of things that have made me not want to be here for the past little while. I've had to be careful about reading comments from people that have never met me, starting to hate myself based on effigies that other people had created of me. I have to try and work to love myself, which is hard. It's hard for most people.
“In line with that song and mentioning my brother and sister, the way our mother operated was to tear us down and put a wedge between the three of us. After she died, we were talking quite a bit. We all thought we all had separate experiences, but she had talked to each of us like we were pieces of shit while talking up the others, and that was really confronting. That line is as much for them as it is for me, and as much for me as it is for the particular person who I have to thank [for writing that comment] – because I needed that.”
You mentioned wanting to do more than “skim the surface” of your experience. How does the rest of the album balance these flickers of optimism while still confronting everything to the extent that you needed to?
“There’s four songs that are just about me, and are for me. Bleed is aggressive, but it's very much an affirmation that I am who I am. Social media is such a strange place because it gives you access to things that are really beautiful and positive, but people say some really nasty stuff. I have Bipolar II [disorder], I'm not immune to it. I don't open my phone and then become some sort of fortress.
“Bleed is about that, and Kickboxer is about taking control of your own situation. Eternal War, that's probably the most insane song we've ever written. We can't get any heavier than that! I don't think it's very hopeful, all in all, but I'm glad I got to sprinkle some positivity. It’s pretty important, especially at this point in human history where things don’t look great.”
House Of Cards is released TBC via Pure Noise Records. The title-track is out now.
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