The Amity Affliction just released their eighth studio album, Not Without My Ghosts, a record that fans noticed has both a heavier sound and heavier themes.
The album’s titular single was the fourth, following on from “I See Dead People”, “Show Me Your God” and “It’s Hell Down Here” – a track vocalist Joel Birch explained was a letter from himself and bandmate Ahren Stringer to their friends who had passed away.
“ I’m 41. I’m bipolar. And I’m pretty tired of it,” Birch said at the time. “The song is wrapping up how I feel daily, and reflect on the time leading up to my friend killing himself. I’m sure a lot of people who have experienced that guilt at not seeing what becomes glaringly obvious after the fact.”
When I now ask Birch straight out, “Are you okay?” he just laughs.
“Um… not really, but you get through it – that’s sort of what the title track is about, he says. But yeah, no. No is the answer. But what do you do?”
Love Metal?
Get the latest Metal news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
Birch says he tries his best to avoid reading the comment sections online, although the majority of fans are kind.
“I am unfortunately very sensitive to those and they can really take their toll – which I guess is a pretty human response – and being in a band you’re in a unique position where people now have access to you on social media and can say some pretty nasty things, that are just a throwaway comment for them but they’re talking about something that we pour a lot of our emotion into,” he says. “It can be quite cutting, so I try to steer away from it.”
At this point, Birch bursts out laughing, telling me he needs to find one comment on the band’s social media that he did recall reading.
“I need to find it, because it was an actual gem,” he laughs. “I was fucking cackling when I read it; I lost it.”
As he searches for the comment in question, we discuss how the global pandemic affected the band, whose previous album was released in 2020. Birch – who at one point had to fly to Mexico and back in three days to process an American visa because Sydney’s US Consulate was closed for renovations – admits the band wouldn’t be the band without what he had been through personally, and says COVID “fucking sucked.”
“It was really brutal on Ahren, I know it nearly broke him,” he says, before interrupting himself: “I found that comment, by the way!” he says triumphantly.
“Someone wrote, ‘These men have been chasing their ghosts for ten years,’ when “Not Without My Ghosts” came out, and then someone wrote, ‘They finally found them,’” he cackles. “I was like, ‘that’s fucking good!’”
The band did release three tracks in 2021 – “Like Love”, “Give Up the Ghost” and “Death Is All Around”, which formed the EP Somewhere Beyond the Blue – their first extended play since 2007’s High Hopes.
“We did the EP almost as a test drive to see how we’d go producing ourselves. And we loved it,” Birch explains. “Because on Everyone Loves You… Once You Leave Them, the producer… I’m not even sure what he added… and we were just like, ‘well, why did we do that?’”
The band went into the studio with two songs in mind, and the mentality of, “let’s just see if we can do it ourselves.”
“But we just ripped through our time in there, and we had a whole other day, so we were like fuck it, let’s do another song,” Birch says. “So yeah, that was the test run, and I daresay we’ll never have a producer again. I don’t think we want or need one.”
The band recorded Not Without My Ghosts at The Grove Studios with engineer Jack Nigro, who also worked with them on the Somewhere… EP.
“We stayed nearby at North Avoca in a beautiful place,” Birch says. “We actually got in there and Dan (Brown) and I decided that they didn’t even need to go to the studio to do Ahren’s vocals, so Dan pulled every mattress that wasn’t being slept on together, and he made this little mattress hut with a microphone in it, and that’s where Ahren recorded his vocals.”
Although the band had full creative control of this record, there are still parts Birch is not entirely happy with, and he is surprised when I tell him how much I enjoyed the previously unreleased track, “Close to Me”.
“You like that one?” he asks. “That’s just… It might be my least favourite on the album.”
After some discussion, Birch explains the reason he dislikes it has very little to do with the song itself, and everything to do with him.
“I could have done so much better – I’m not sure how I let it get through, actually,” he concedes. “That line, “Just stay away from me please,” – it’s just absolutely trashed the whole song for me. There’re a few things in there, actually. Just the lyrics. The idea is right, but the lyrics could have been done better.”
The song, which is about being self-destructive, is one Birch believes anyone with similar problems will likely understand the sentiment he was trying to convey.
“I think the line, “Drag those I love towards the edge,” sort of encompasses the whole song: you push people away who are trying to help you, and you don’t want help,” he says. “It’s weird – it’s a paradox – you kind of want to be helped, but you don’t want people to help you, and it all gets pretty overwhelming.”
There is one lyric Birch likes in the track, however. “I do like the line, “I don’t want to exist, but I have to survive for the ones I’d leave behind,”” he says. “I think that’s poignant.”
Birch is nothing if not the sum of his experiences, and that’s something he reflects on in the track “God Voice”, which was inspired, in part, by his upbringing in the Pentecostal Christian faith.
“It all comes from the way I was brought up and my experiences in the church and what I witnessed, and how I can reflect on that now that I’m older,” he says. “The older you get, the more you can reflect on those deep existential questions like, ‘Who am I? Why am I like this? What shaped me into being who I am?’ And your experiences kind of become something to reflect on.”
These reflections led to lyrics like, “Am I the god voice inside my head? Am I the voice that says you’re better off dead?” which Birch calls “absurd.”
“You know, your internal dialogue is not coming from an external being – your internal dialogue is shaped over the course of your life, and is sort of a way of processing things as a human being – these people who subscribe some meaning to it outside of that I just find ludicrous, to be honest,” he laughs. “I think for some people it’s a nice way to cope with things, or whatever, but to me it seems absurd. You’re talking to yourself. You’re praying for something, but you’re praying to yourself, you know what I mean?”
For Birch, it’s all quite simple: there’s nothing more to it.
“Even the line, “I know when I go the pain is over,” is quite dark, but that’s just how I see it,” he says. “I don’t think there’s anything after it: when you die you die.”
Fans needn’t worry about Birch right now, though – he has plenty to look forward to. In fact, he’s really stoked for the rest of the year, which includes their current North American tour, a European tour, headline Australian shows, a stack of festival spots and a massive ‘Monsters of Oz’ North American run with Parkway Drive and Northlane, which the whole band is looking forward to.
“Sometimes we do Euro runs and we play to like 300 people, like in Milan, and it’s just a bit… Okay, the recent time there was actually amazing – despite the small number of people – it was a very good show… But sometimes you do see spots like that and you’re just like, ah, fuck!” he laughs.
“But the rest of the year has no moments like that in it as far as I can see, so we’re pretty fucking psyched. And yeah, touring with Parkway will be psycho – it’s probably the best thing that has ever happened to our band, I dare say.”
The Amity Affliction’s Not Without My Ghosts is out now via Warner Music Australia.
