THE AMITY AFFLICTION

With a musicality as heavy and hard-hitting as singer Joel Birch’s intensely emotional lyrics—about suicide, gun violence, religion and mental illness—Not Without My Ghosts finds The Amity Affliction at their brutal best. With four vocal features, including rising Los Angeles talent Phem, the band’s first female feature, on the title track, the Australian quartet’s eighth LP pushes the boundaries and genres of heavy music.

The album’s 10 songs were self-produced at Grove Studios in New South Wales. Not Without My Ghosts follows 2020’s Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them and several non-album singles in 2021-22. For Not Without My Ghosts, “We wanted to go as heavy as possible,” says bassist/clean singer Ahren Stringer. “On “I See Dead People” (which features Louie Knuxx, the New Zealand rapper who died unexpectedly in 2021), we just went balls-to-the-wall to show off that side of us, letting people know we’re not a one-trick pony.”
Proof positive of TAA’s versatility is the song “Not Without My Ghosts” ft. Phem, which closes the album with a decidedly spooky and softer energy. Fromstart to finish, TAA’s whisper-to-a-scream energy, clean and unclean vocals and Dan Brown’s masterfully dynamic guitar work underscores each track’s dramatic ups and downs.

The album’s first single, "Show Me Your God," dropped in November 2022 with an incendiary music video. The song uses “God” as a metaphor for another three-letter-word, as gleaned via Birch’s lyrics: “Show
me your god / Does he come with a clip / Are his teeth made of steel / Is there death in his grip?” Reflecting on the track, the front man notes that “America has become like a second home. It has the best and worst of everything you can imagine, and their unique gun culture means that guns makeup the lion's share of methods used in suicides; while I don't have the solution, I wanted to reflect on what it would have meant for me personally had I grown up there."

In
everything they do, The Amity Affliction are about connection, with themselves and others. “I don't believe that people are as different as the media would have us believe,” says Birch. “I think the biggest thing that Ahren and I have been able to do with the band is help people connect with a feeling they may have. I write for myself, but I write knowing that I'm not the only one going through it, and that not everyone can articulate their feelings in the same way.”

Mortality, on both a world-wide and intimate level, is addressed via several songs on Not Without My Ghosts. Birch wrote the 2021 single “Like Love” for Stringer, who was grappling with the suicide of his close friend SK. The pummeling new track, “It’s Hell Down Here” with its haunting underlying melody and clean vocals’ chorus, is about the suicide of one of Birch’s own friends. “I’m 41. I’m bipolar. And I'm pretty tired of it,” Birch says. “That’s where lyrics like “like a snake I tire / the cold dark clouds, they steal my light” come from. The song is wrapping up how I feel daily, and reflecting 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.”

Birch is grateful for the catharsis that writing and performing with The Amity Affliction offers him. As for those who don’t have an outlet and ultimately choose to not go on living? “That's where a lot of the lyrics on this album stemmed from,” explains the singer. “The semi-desperate feelings of guilt and always asking ‘why?’ ‘Should they be here instead of me? Do I deserve what I've got?’”

The Amity Affliction’s honest exploration of those questions strikes home. The appreciation of one YouTube commenter reflects the many, as he thanks the band for “Show Me Your God,” posting: “As a military veteran who fights demons, who fights to stay alive, who almost ended my life in the summer… This song hits so deep to my core, that I thank you guys for saving me to stay alive!!!”

Birch is aware that his own struggle with mental illness can keep him mired in self-doubt, but also knows he’s not alone in those feelings. Over the last nearly 20 years that openness has garnered The Amity Affliction millions of fans who deeply resonate with the band, driving both streams and kudos for the lineup. Four records in a row—2012’s Chasing Ghosts; Let the Ocean Take Me (2014); This Could Be Heartbreak (2016); and 2018’s Misery (2018), debuted at #1 on Australia’s ARIA Charts. In the U.S., Let The Ocean Take Me [2014] and This Could Be Heartbreak [2016] both debuted in
the top 30 Billboard Top 200, while 2018’s Misery [2018] elevated the band to new critical heights, helping the band reach a total stream tally that has surpassed a billion.

Since
a teenaged Stringer formed The Amity Affliction while in high school back in 2004, the band’s influences have been myriad, their growth prolific. “We go through phases where what we’re listening to is coming out through the music,” says Stringer. While the bassist grew up on bands including Primus, lately, he says, “Me and Dan have been listening to a lot of death metal. And Joel, he probably has pandemic anger coming through.”

Giving
Not Without My Ghosts an even wider scope are the vocal features on “Death And The Setting Sun,” with Andrew Neufeld of Canadian band Comeback Kid; and ”When It Rains It Pours” ft. Landon Tewers, of The Plot in You and ex-Before Their Eyes. “He’s a good friend,” says Stringer of Tewers. “He's got those really brutal metalcore vocals. We realized we hadn't really done a lot of features the last few records and we were excited to mix it up.”

With everything they create, The Amity Affliction are about their fans, and take feedback to heart. Stringer hopes the band’s intense efforts on Not Without My Ghosts are clear. “We listen. We know what people want to hear. We try our hardest to weigh our musical integrity with how we want people to enjoy the music.” That said, he concludes, “it's a balancing act; you can't please everyone, and we’ve got to expand our horizons and try new things.”

Not Without My Ghosts (a phrase that Birch saw on a gallery wall in the UK and felt it summed up his state of being and songwriting) seems poised to excite existing fans and engage new ones. If Birch is “pulling all this shit behind me that I can't seem to let go of” and writing lyrics about how these “ghosts” weigh on him, he hopes fans won’t attach directly to his own personal story or inspirations. “I don’t want listeners to take away my specific meaning,” he explains of the lyrics. “They same way I can't build a house, perhaps a carpenter can't write a song. We all have something of our own that we're able to give to people. Listeners can take from the songs what they will. This is the thing I can give. And that's what I want to keep doing.”

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COMEBACK KID

Complacency kills creativity, and nobody seems to know that better than COMEBACK KID.

»Outsider«, the long-running hardcore outfit’s latest LP, showcases that in spades. Capturing the all-out intensity of the band’s riotous live shows, it’s as urgent and unrelenting as anything they’ve done in the past. And yet while many of their peers consider sonic evolution an enemy of their scene, COMEBACK KID has built a career on progression and evolution, continually expanding their now-signature sound while never compromising its integrity. “We’re a hardcore band, but we don’t feel like we belong to any particular sect of that,” states frontman Andrew Neufeld, speaking on behalf of bandmates Jeremy Hiebert (guitar), Stu Ross (guitar), Ron Friesen (bass), and Loren Legare (drums). “We don’t want to be limited in any sense, and prefer to work on our own terms.” Indeed, over the course of their career, they’ve covered a lot of territory – both musically and literally.

COMEBACK KID first united in 2000 and dropped their debut LP, »Turn It Around«, in 2003. Its follow-up, 2005’s »Wake the Dead«, further cemented the band’s foundation of energetic, punk-propelled hardcore. With the departure of original vocalist Scott Wade, Neufeld moved from guitar to lead vocals ahead of 2007’s »Broadcasting...« More recent releases like »Symptoms + Cures« and 2014’s »Die Knowing« find the band incorporating a wider array of elements and influences into their combustible sonic concoction.

»Outsider« – COMEBACK KID’s sixth full-length and first on the iconic Nuclear Blast Records (New Damage Records in Canada) – represents the pinnacle of that progress to date, simultaneously pushing new boundaries while returning to the in-your-face immediacy of their first releases. “It’s always been about refining what we do and incorporating new things,” Neufeld affirms. “This time around, we were really focused on songs that we knew would connect from the stage.” To that point, ‘Surrender Control’ is essentially a clinic in inciting a riotous moshpit with an anthemic chorus while ‘Absolute’ injects some thrash metal into more familiar CBK staples of call-and-response gang vocals and a punishing outro breakdown. They’re as furious as anything in the band’s back catalogue and effective foils to more ambitious offerings like ‘Hell of a Scene’, which combines blazing blast beats in the verses with an infections melodic hardcore chorus, and the more hard rock-centric ‘Consumed the Vision’. Neufeld’s voice is as powerful and piercing as ever while also pushing into new, often more melodic territory. That’s fitting considering the wide breadth of topics he tackles in his lyrics, from the plight of innovative thinkers to a world ripe with distractions from meaningful interactions to wrestling with personal demons, however they might materialize.

Of course, these 13 tracks will be volatile in the live environment. As longtime road warriors who are strangers to nowhere, COMEBACK KID is sure to continue conquering new corners of the world. “We’ve always prided ourselves on trying to reach as many places as possible,” Neufeld offers, and their still-swelling crowds everywhere from Southeast Asia to South America to mainland Europe are proof of that. They’ve performed at virtually every major heavy music festival and shared the stage with a who’s who of their peers across virtually every genre that seeps into their ever-evolving sound.

After six LPs, an EP, two live albums, and countless shows over the course of 15-plus years, COMEBACK KID still takes pride in pushing sonic boundaries and bringing their riotous live show across new borders. “We still feel lucky to be a part of this,” Neufeld says assuredly. “It’s bigger than us and we have no intentions of slowing down or standing still.”

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ALPHA WOLF

“A wolf that hides in sheep’s clothing will never be the Alpha.”

An iron will is only ever hardened within the forge, and Australia’s fastest rising metalcore act Alpha Wolf have proven they are made of sterner stuff. The five piece bared their teeth in 2019 with the release of their EP Fault in joint partnership with Greyscale Records and SharpTone Records, it became a line in the sand that set expectations for all that would follow.

The band played sold out shows across Australia both headlining, and in support of acts such as Polaris and August Burns Red; as well as a slew of international tours across Asia, Europe, and even dipping their toes in to the American market.

If Fault was the line in the sand however, Alpha Wolf desired to make their mark permanent, something etched in stone for all to see. The band needed to push themselves harder, the band needed to prove they were worthy of their name, the band needed ‘a quiet place to die’.

2020 sees Alpha Wolf bite harder than ever with their Sophomore release ‘a quiet place to die’, the culmination of every lesson learnt, every hit taken, and every loss felt. ‘a quiet place to die’ is the end result of five individuals who have faced the fire and refuse to flinch, pouring their everything into making something they are truly proud of. The path to this point has only made their thirst greater, and soon enough, the wolves will be out for blood.