The Amity Affliction’s Ninth Album ‘House of Cards’ Out Now

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28 Apr

Written By The Note

House of Cards includes the singles ‘Bleed’, ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Heaven Sent’.

Australian metalcore band The Amity Affliction sits in a dark locker room. Four members in casual streetwear pose for a moody group portrait indoors. — Image Tom Brown

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The Amity Affliction dropped their long-awaited ninth studio album House of Cards last week.

Featuring the singles ‘Bleed’, ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Heaven Sent’, the record is 12 tracks of brutal metalcore with feeling that navigates themes such as grief, rage, loss and addiction.

It’s also the band’s first release with new member and clean vocalist Jonny Reeves, who joins the trio of Joel Birch, Dan Brown and Joe Longobardi.

For Birch, this album is an incredibly personal one; a project he explains is “almost entirely written about my mother”, and the experiences he has navigated as a young person.

“...If it isn’t about my mother specifically, it is about things that I have experienced that are directly tied to my experience growing up and where that has landed me now. ‘Break These Chains’ is directly tied to that and the confusion I felt when dealing with my mother dying and all the crazy shit she had at her house, ‘Speaking In Tongues’ is about the hypocrisy of my mother sending me off to church constantly throughout my life and my very negative experiences within said church, ‘Afterlife’ is me musing on my lack of belief that there is an afterlife, ‘Reap What You Sow’ follows on from there in its own way and ‘Eternal War’ is the closer that explains how I find myself feeling a lot of the time.

“There is a line in there, ‘the fool is blind the hand is dealt’, which I wrote about my consistent hope that one day my mother would change, written in the context of a gambling addict chasing the perfect hand.”

The Amity Affliction have also shared a music video for the focus track ‘Kickboxer’, which you can check out above.

Speaking on the song, Birch remembers, “The way this song came about is very funny: Dan was watching Kickboxer on the bus and there is a line in the movie where Van Damme says ‘It’s good stuff, what is this?’ and the answer is ‘translated, kiss of death’. Dan sent me a text later that night… ‘Hey can you write a song with ‘Kiss of Death’ in it?’

“When he asks things like this it’s always because he has had a song come to him and knows exactly how he wants it to sound before it’s written. I wrote that song in my bunk on tour, as I do many others, and it’s just a song expressing my distaste for the way I grew up having people pray for me, or lay hands on me to pray, and how I’m not waiting on some divine being to come and save me from any situation I am in.”

House of Cards by The Amity Affliction is out now via Pure Noise Records. Listen here. Check out the album artwork and tracklisting below.