Joel Birch says The Amity Affliction hasn’t changed without Ahren Stringer, pushing back on fan claims the band lost its identity.
Joel Birch is pushing back on the idea that The Amity Affliction changed when Ahren Stringer left.
More than a year after a split that fractured the band’s fanbase, Birch is now directly challenging one of the loudest narratives to come out of it. That losing Stringer meant losing the band.
Speaking on the Loaded Radio Podcast, he didn’t hedge it.
“Like nothing changed. Like there’s no change.”
It’s a direct response to the “no Ahren, no Amity” sentiment that’s followed the band since 2025. And Birch made it clear he doesn’t buy into it.
“People online saying ‘no Amity’… yeah, true if you want. But also no Dan, no Amity. No me, no Amity.”
At the centre of that argument is how the band actually writes its music. Birch says guitarist Dan Brown has been the primary songwriter for over a decade, while he’s handled the vast majority of the lyrics.
“I’ve written most of the lyrics since I joined. Probably 95 percent.”
For a band where Stringer’s clean vocals became a defining part of the sound, that’s a shift in how the story gets told. Birch did credit Stringer’s role in shaping melodies across earlier releases, calling it “incredible,” but said that had already started to change in recent years.
“Ahren wrote all the melodies for a long time… but over the last few releases, Dan started having more of a hand in that as well.”
The point he’s making is simple. What fans are reacting to now isn’t a sudden change. It’s something that had already been happening behind the scenes.
That sits against a much heavier backdrop.
When Ahren Stringer exited the band, it wasn’t framed as a creative shift. Birch reiterated that the situation had reached a point where the band’s future was on the line.
“It was that or the band stopped being a band. It was that serious.”
At the time, both sides pointed to deeper issues, with the band referencing an “irreparable breakdown” and Stringer later saying he felt pushed out. What followed was a messy, public fallout that reshaped how fans saw the band.
Birch isn’t trying to erase that.
“What happened is so separate to what he contributed,” he said. “There is a grief that comes with that.”
But he is drawing a line between that fallout and how the band actually functions.
For a lot of fans, Stringer wasn’t just part of The Amity Affliction. He was part of what defined it.
Birch is now asking them to see it differently.
The Amity Affliction over the years.
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