Why do I still care about The Amity Affliction? It's actually an easier question to answer now than it has been for a while. Having apparently spent the years from 2015~2019 trying to be the absolute worst band they (or anyone else) could be, Brisbane's breakout metalcore superstars staged something of a comeback with the surprisingly heavy and explicitly black-metal-inflected 2020 album Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them (which still had a song called "Aloneliness" on it, along with far too much finger clicking). They then followed that up with an even heavier and noticeably more consistent album in Not Without My Ghosts (2023), which is way better than I originally gave them credit for. Though this should have been a triumphant time for the band, things have been a bit turbulent since then.
Earlier this year, The Amity Affliction suddenly split with founding bassist/clean-singer Ahren Stringer, whose oddly timbred and overly processed clean vocals quickly became the centrepiece of the bands sound, with everyone seemingly having had enough of his bullshit as my ears have over the past two decades. They then quickly recruited Jonathan Reeves from Californian crew Kingdom of Giants and went about business as usual. It presented an unfortunate but potentially potent moment for the band to refresh and reinvent themselves at a time when their stock was flying a lot higher than it had been for some time (at least amid more serious metal/core circles). What they've done instead though, is release one of the most generic sounding and unintentionally hilarious albums in their genre's history.
As the pulsing electronic throb of intro track "Vida Nueva" pointlessly fades away, we're treated to a film sample of a girl saying "All i ever wanted was a kiss", before vocalist Joel Birch comes in screaming "Kiss... OF DEATH!!!" at the top of his lungs and the band drop into the most generic breakdown groove you can imagine. It's fucking hysterical, and only gets funnier with each listen, to the point where now I spend most of the intro track giggling with anticipation of what's to come, and I won't pretend I haven't developed some kind of ironic appreciation during my time with the promo, that has me screaming "KIIIIIIISS! OF DEEEEEAAAATH! ...DEEEEAAAAAATHH!" along with him during the obligatory down-tempo beatdown at the end.
Next-up is the title-track, which the most generic-sounding Amity Affliction by numbers song they or anyone else could have come up with. From the moment you see it's one of those annoying black and white hardcore videos you've seen a billion times, you can tell how uninspired it is. Then they hit you with the opening line "Sister, I never saw you get your flowers", dating it to this exact, specific moment in co-opting trendy online/black vernacular, and then doubling down on it with an irritating "flow-ers" echo tag. The rest of the lyrics are made up of similarly soulless cliches; count them with me:
Living out in the cold and you were hanging by a thread
For all these years, the blood, the sweat, the dread
The tears and voices in my head
They paint a picture of a disaster inside me
We can always see into the stars
But we can't see the hurt inside our hearts
Everything that glitters isn't gold
I'm sick of always sleeping in the freezing cold
Just when you think it can't get any more irritating or tiresome, they rhyme "mo-ther" with "bro-ther" (bro-thurr-er-er) and finish with some more platitudes about how (woah-oh) "hate is easy" and you need to "love yourself" over the top of a watered down Polaris riff. If lyrics like this make you feel better about the world, then I'm happy for you. As for whether it makes for good or even mildly interesting art: Absolutely not.
...And that's just the beginning. While its opening songs are certainly its most incidentally entertaining, there's also the album's horrendously ugly cover art, which several many people must have had to sign off on at some point (whether it's AI or not), the way they insist on repeatedly taking the most ridiculous and rudimentary breakdowns onto the end of the sappiest songs you've ever heard, or how it sounds like they're constantly saying "I peed" all the time on this song—although that last one might just me. I'd talk about the second half, but along with being heavily frontloaded, the album also completely resets with pointless interlude track "Besso De La Muerte" and essentially does the same thing all over again, albeit with less obviously cringey lyrics.
As the white background of its cover suggests, this is a much brighter, cleaner affair than its immediate predecessors, with all of the band's notorious references to bodies of water—oceans, clouds, lakes, puddles; the lot of them!—having seemingly been excised alongside Stringer. While this is perhaps a welcome reprieve from that particular dead horse, longtime fans of the band as much as their detractors may have a hard time facing up to the fact that, without Stringer, there just isn't a whole lot of there left there. It's like that time Tom DeLonge left Blink-182 and everyone immediately realised Mark Hoppus had always been the problem all along.
Or maybe it's more like that time Bury Tomorrow kicked that John Mayer-sounding guy out for being a chud but completely lost their edge and identity along the way. Reeves does a fine enough job, I guess, but he's also about as indistinct a replacement that the band could have opted for. I simply cannot believe it's not that guy from In Heart's Wake who sang that corny "Farewell" song, and I'm sure there are many others out there who could take his place without me, or anybody else knowing. conversely, if Stringer shows up on or with a new project, you're definitely going to know it's him. Moreover, while the instrumentation continues to lean into the heavier side of The amity Affliction's sound, it's all exceedingly similar and formulaic, with the poppier, almost Issues-sounding choruses they opt for here also jarring oddly with their steriley savage surrounds.
The Amity Affliction have always done their own thing and taken some absolutely wild swings at times, for better or (often) worse, but this could be any metalcore band these days. If this were a new band, I'd be saying hey, this is a well produced and solid sounding foundation with a good sense of songwriting that could be improved with some more variation and more meaningful lyrics. More likely though, I simply wouldn't listen to it, let alone write about it. It's not though, it's the tenth album from one of modern metalcore's most popular acts, following the loss of one of their key members, if there was ever a time to make a statement it was now, and House of Cards simply has nothing to say.
...I guess I'll just have to go and spin Severed Ties again and wait for the next Amity Affliction album to come along and convince me that this one wasn't all that bad actually.
Author's Note: I write positive reviews as well! They just usually get folded into the Release Roundups.