The Amity Affliction: Embracing Darkness in Music

The Amity Affliction frontman speaks to Bigmouth about the emotional release of the band’s live shows, the deeply personal power of “Drag the Lake,” the difficult reception to Misery, life inside the social-media outrage machine and why the band are already writing again.

The Amity Affliction have never shied away from darkness. Across more than two decades, the Australian metalcore band have built a powerful connection with listeners by confronting grief, addiction and mental illness with an honesty that offers recognition rather than easy answers.

That connection remains at the heart of their ninth album, House of Cards. Ahead of the band’s return to the UK, vocalist and lyricist Joel Birch joined the Bigmouth Rock Show to discuss the new record, the emotional weight carried by the band’s music and what comes next for The Amity Affliction.

In a candid conversation, Birch also reflected on the album that nearly derailed their career, explained how online outrage can capture both creators and their audiences, praised two of modern metal’s biggest frontmen and revealed that new Amity material is already taking shape.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“There’s an emotional release happening in the crowd”

BIGMOUTH: You’re returning to the UK for your first headline shows here in a couple of years. What can fans expect?

JOEL BIRCH: We have a set that goes back to 2012, so it covers 14 years of songs.

Someone asked me about the shows the other day and I felt so cringe answering it, but it does seem like there’s an emotional release happening in the crowd when we play. A lot of people cry.

I think that’s kind of cool because it’s something I can connect to while we’re onstage.

Maybe I’ll cry too. I did in America. It’s never off the cards.

Why sad songs can make people feel less alone

BIGMOUTH: I discovered “Drag the Lake” during a very dark period in my own life. It didn’t magically fix anything, but it made me feel accepted and validated in what I was experiencing. Why do you think such a dark song can make people feel better?

JOEL: From what I understand, plenty of psychologists have looked at that phenomenon: when you’re sad, sad songs can lift you up.

Maybe that comes from the empathy baked into being a human being. When you can feel yourself in somebody else’s experience, that’s pretty powerful.

I obviously don’t listen back to Amity to get that feeling, but I listen to other music for it. For me, one of the greatest and most special things about being in the band is being able to take part in that kind of giving.

In your case, the song gave you the experience of feeling seen in your hurt. You can hear that somebody else has gone through what you’re going through. It might not be the exact same thing, but you can relate to the underlying feeling.

That can be upsetting because you’re confronted by the reality of it, but the music also gives you a release from that feeling. It’s very special.

The song Joel Birch could only perform once

BIGMOUTH: Is there a song that gives you that same feeling?

JOEL: I listen to Balance and Composure, Citizen, Poison the Well and my late friend’s band. His name was Shane Collins and the band was called The Gift Horse.

It’s sad that he’s dead, but I feel blessed that he had a band and I can still hear him whenever I want.

The last song on Misery is called “The Gift Horse,” and it contains lyrics from one of his songs: “There’s a message at the bottom of the bottle and it’s calling out to me, singing, ‘I can set you free.’”

He was amazing. I wrote that song for him and we played it once. I wept the whole time and we never played it again.

BIGMOUTH: Was it simply too much to perform live?

JOEL: Emotionally, it was too much. I wanted to play it because his partner, Tara, was going to be there, but she didn’t make it in time.

We played it anyway and it was a lot. It was probably too much for the other guys as well. They were looking at me like, “Fuck.”

House of Cards and the weight of a new chapter

BIGMOUTH: House of Cards is an intensely personal record, exploring family, childhood trauma and complicated grief. Now that it has had time to breathe, how do you feel about it?

JOEL: We finished it in September last year, so for us it sat there for a long time. I still like it.

I think we did really well, especially given that it’s the first album without Ahren. We did about as well as we could have done and we’re really happy with it. There was obviously a lot riding on it.

I didn’t read much of the feedback. I never really do. I saw a little of the same old stuff, but people were shitting on the album before this one and the album before that.

They pick a new reason each time, but it doesn’t really matter.

“Misery nearly fucked our whole career”

BIGMOUTH: Do musicians now feel that listeners approach new releases expecting them to be bad?

JOEL: Yes. Being in a band is strange because we’re trying to write what we want while also working out whether what we want to write is what people want to hear.

The industry is so fickle that there’s an extreme fear of putting something out that can tank your career. We nearly did that with Misery.

The craziest thing is that Misery nearly fucked our whole career, but eight years later, those songs are among our most streamed. It makes no sense.

I’ve spoken to Dan about it recently. I came to the conclusion that if we had released it as part of a double album—half Misery and half something more recognisably Amity—it could have done really well.

Instead, it came out on its own and was a brutal step away from the norm. It caught people by surprise.

But what do you do? It’s music. If you keep doing the same thing, people hate you for that too. It’s a fine line.

Why following trends is rarely as calculated as fans imagine

BIGMOUTH: Some listeners interpreted Misery as the band chasing a trend. Was that fair?

JOEL: It came across to some people as a cash grab, but it reflected what Dan and Ahren were listening to at the time. They weren’t listening to heavy music.

I write the lyrics and have nothing to do with the music, and at the time I was very against it.

But it’s a band. It isn’t the Joel show, so everything is a discussion. In that discussion, they said, “Too bad—this is what we’re writing.” That was how it was.

We’re touring, listening to things and subconsciously seeing who is going up and who is going down. We can’t help it because we exist within that world.

I don’t think many people consciously decide to release a cookie-cutter metalcore album because that’s what is popular.

Albums can take two years. Sometimes you finish recording and another band releases something similar before anybody even knows you’re done.

It’s devastating because when your song finally comes out, people think you ripped them off. Sometimes these things just happen.

Social media, outrage and “audience capture”

BIGMOUTH: You’ve had people accuse the House of Cards artwork of being AI-generated, despite naming the artist. Why do those comments become so persistent?

JOEL: People just say, “That’s AI slop.” I tell them it isn’t, but whatever.

I look at some accounts—with a profile photo, 100 followers, ten posts and 5,000 accounts they’re following—and wonder whether they’re even real people.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse. They spoke to somebody who works on the systems that keep people engaged.

He explained that negative feedback loops are what get people addicted.

If you opened Instagram and constantly saw exactly what you wanted, you would become less inclined to keep opening it. Because you don’t know what you’ll get, it becomes like a slot machine.

That’s why the platforms feed rage. The human brain is hardwired to focus on negative things more than positive ones.

BIGMOUTH: That creates a difficult incentive for creators because negative stories often perform better.

JOEL: That’s audience capture. Since journalism has been outsourced to the individual, you can follow that arc with a lot of people.

You start by posting that a band is touring or that somebody has died. Then you see the engagement and, because your income depends on engagement, you begin posting only what drives it.

Even if the platform increased that engagement in a less-than-legitimate way, you become captured by it.

Your audience then changes as the algorithm captures you. It becomes more rabid, and you have to feed it increasingly insane material to keep people engaged.

Joel Birch on Chris Motionless and Ronnie Radke

BIGMOUTH: Chris Motionless has always been incredibly supportive whenever I’ve covered his band. Is he really one of the nicest people in metal?

JOEL: He’s so lovely. He is easily one of the nicest people in the whole scene.

BIGMOUTH: What do you make of Ronnie Radke as a performer?

JOEL: I don’t know Ronnie as a person. Being in the music world, I dismiss a lot of what I read because I see people saying things about me that are the exact opposite of who I am.

But I watch Falling in Reverse whenever we’re on a festival with them. He’s one of the best frontmen in the game. He is very, very entertaining.

I watched them and immediately understood it. If that were the kind of music I liked, I’d think, “Yes, you’re fucking amazing.”

Jonny Reeves and new Amity music

BIGMOUTH: Jonny Reeves sounds incredible on House of Cards. What has he brought to the band?

JOEL: He’s incredible—and a great person, which is always a bonus. I don’t think we showed everything he can do on the album.

BIGMOUTH: Does that mean another album is already on the horizon?

JOEL: We’re already writing. We’re looking at the time we have next year and identifying where the studio gap is. It doesn’t really stop.

We’re hoping to release a song or a couple of songs within the next six months, just for fun, and see how we go.

We’re excited to get Jonny singing on more songs. The more Jonny, the better.

The Amity Affliction’s ninth album, House of Cards, is out now. Watch the complete Joel Birch interview on the Bigmouth Rock News YouTube channel or listen to the Bigmouth Rock Show on Spotify.