Nine months after being pushed out of the band he started, Aaron Stainthorpe has a new one — and it is stocked with the people who helped him build My Dying Bride in the first place.
The singer, who co-founded My Dying Bride in 1990 and fronted it for 35 years before his 2025 exit, has launched Towards The Sinister, a project reuniting him with three former bandmates: guitarist Calvin Robertshaw, bassist Ade Jackson and drummer Rick Miah. Rounding out the lineup are second guitarist Chris Revett, keyboardist Mark Deeks and violinist Emma Allington.
The name is no accident. “Towards The Sinister” was the title of My Dying Bride‘s debut demo, cut at Revolver Studios in November 1990 — the very first thing the band ever committed to tape. The new group’s entire purpose is to revisit that era.
Towards The Sinister exists to play the early material, and only the early material. The setlist draws from the band’s opening run of records, As The Flower Withers, Turn Loose The Swans, The Angel And The Dark River and Like Gods Of The Sun, the albums that helped define death-doom and, for many fans, remain the band’s high-water mark.
That is a deliberate boundary, and Stainthorpe was blunt about why.
“[It will be material from] the first four albums. That’s the songs these guys wrote. They’re not interested in performing songs they didn’t help write. It’s the first four-album period, which we’ll concentrate on and which is the best period, according to the fans. I don’t see it myself; I’ve been writing My Dying Bride songs for years and years. The rest of the boys, they’re not interested in playing stuff they didn’t write. The focus is the first four. We’ll do all of the classics. Obviously, we can’t do them all at the same time, but we have a decent setlist. You know what it’s like: There will be people in the audience screaming for songs that aren’t in the setlist, but they will be the next time we come around. We plan to play as many of them as we can, even some that have never been played live. We’re going to look into all of them,” he told Blabbermouth.
By Stainthorpe‘s telling, nobody set out to form a band. It grew out of a reunion drink that only happened because My Dying Bride publicly parted ways with him.
“I’ve not seen Calvin, Rick or Ade for a decade. They don’t live a million miles away. I ran into Calvin a couple of times at a festival in Scarborough up the northeast coast called Fortress Fest. I bumped into him a couple of times there, but that’s really about it. It was only when, I think, My Dying Bride issued this statement ‘firing’ me that these guys came out of the shadows with loads of support, which was wonderful. It was great to hear from them,” he explained. “They suggested, ‘Let’s get together for a drink for old times’ sake.’ We met in a pub. Martin [Powell], our old violin player, tagged along. Dave Pybus, who used to be in Anathema and worked for Peaceville Records, tagged along. We all had a really good catch-up. It was great fun. This was in October of last year. We didn’t discuss anything about reforming. We took a photo of all of us. I popped it on the socials, and that got people talking. And that got us talking. Honestly, we were talking about the old times. The ridiculous times. We did this festival, we did that gig, we got drunk here, we fell over there. It was brilliant. Then we were complaining about arthritic knees and all that stuff. The Internet sort of decided, ‘I wonder if they’re getting together?’ I got messages from Rick and Calvin, saying, ‘Should we have another get-together and discuss what the Internet is discussing?’ I said, ‘All right. Why not?’ We got together, and after a few more drinks, we sort of thought about the idea. No single person instigated it. As I said, I think the Internet instigated it. We mulled it over. Could we pull it off? Do we want to, more importantly? Rick was so keen to get behind the drum kit. Chomping at the bit, really. It’s been a long time for him. Calvin has had his own project, Many Suffer, which is great. You’ve got to remember: We, back when we were kids, helped write those early My Dying Bride albums. We’re on them. We penned them. And we thought, ‘Yeah, let’s play them again.'”
Though the project starts as a live celebration of old songs, Stainthorpe says original material is already taking shape, largely thanks to Robertshaw:
“Yes, there will be new material. Calvin never stops writing. I think he’s working on his second Many Suffer album, but he has written some stuff that won’t fit with Many Suffer but will work with us. I don’t think Many Suffer is a great deal like My Dying Bride; it’s certainly more death metal. You have to remember, My Dying Bride did a lot of death metal. It wasn’t all doom. A lot of that was Calvin‘s riffs. We’ve got some new stuff. Like, a couple of songs that Calvin‘s mooted to us, saying, ‘Would these work?’ They’re definitely going to work. But we’re not in any rush to do that.”
The band plans a handful of small warm-up shows in England first, with European festival slots pencilled in for next summer.
Towards The Sinister only exists because of how things ended at Stainthorpe‘s old band. In October 2025, My Dying Bride announced it had officially parted ways with the singer — less than a year after bringing in Mikko Kotamäki of Swallow The Sun to handle live vocals from 2025 onward.
At the time, My Dying Bride framed the decision as a painful but necessary one:
“My Dying Bride have decided to part ways with vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe.”
“Please understand that this decision does not come lightly, hence our initial and painful silence while we gathered our thoughts and carefully considered our response to the disengaged, eerily abandoned state we suddenly found ourselves in.”
“Our collective decision to move forward without him is not something we thought we would ever be forced to say, but to ensure a continued legacy for what we hold dear to our hearts, we simply have to move past this. Whilst change can be difficult, we are doing our best to bring this new chapter forward with powerful positivity.”
“My Dying Bride are not on hiatus, we were never on hiatus.”
“However, we do genuinely wish Aaron all the luck in the world in his new solo endeavours.”
The band’s most recent album, A Mortal Binding, featured Stainthorpe on vocals and arrived in April 2024 via Nuclear Blast Records. Notably, guitarist Andrew Craighan, the one founding member still in My Dying Bride, is not part of the new project.
Stainthorpe has not been idle since the split. His other band, High Parasite, released its debut album Forever We Burn in September 2024 through Candlelight/Spinefarm, produced by Gregor Mackintosh of Paradise Lost.
