Aaron Stainthorpe has admitted that seeing My Dying Bride perform with someone else behind the microphone has been too painful to watch — so painful, in fact, that he has stopped following the band he co-founded altogether.
The singer helped start the influential British death-doom outfit in 1990 and fronted it for 35 years before being dismissed in 2025. My Dying Bride have carried on since, now performing with Mikko Kotamäki of Finnish doom band Swallow The Sun. Stainthorpe says he has deliberately looked away.
Asked in a new Blabbermouth interview what it has been like to watch his former band continue without him, Stainthorpe did not hide how much it stings:
“It’s heartbreaking, to be honest. I’ve seen cover bands doing My Dying Bride songs. I quite like that; it’s entertaining but seeing someone in my shoes, it’s an awkward thing. It doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t seem to be working for the fans. It is what it is. It’s not going to change now. To stop my heartache, I stopped following anything My Dying Bride does. It’s too painful to see it. I don’t bother. All of my friends check it out, and I just tell them, ‘Don’t tell me. I’m not interested. I’ve moved on. I’m moving into a better place.’ I know people are going to be like, ‘Who are we going to see?’ They’ve got one original member; we’ve got four! Who do you want to go and see? I’m not going into that argument, but, yeah, it’s not easy seeing someone else do my job. I can’t change that. I have no intention of changing it.”
The “four” he refers to are the ex-My Dying Bride members now standing beside him in his new band. His old group’s only remaining founding member is guitarist Andrew Craighan. My Dying Bride have described the split differently, framing it publicly as a mutual parting after being left in what they called an “eerily abandoned state” — an account Stainthorpe has disputed.
Rather than fight to reclaim his old job, Stainthorpe has poured his energy into Towards The Sinister. The project reunites him with founding My Dying Bride guitarist Calvin Robertshaw, original bassist Ade Jackson and drummer Rick Miah, rounded out by second guitarist Chris Revett, keyboardist Mark Deeks and violinist Emma Allington. Its name is itself a deep cut — “Towards The Sinister” was the title of My Dying Bride‘s 1990 debut demo.
He said the project took shape after he reconnected with former bandmates following his departure from My Dying Bride:
“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. 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.’”
He also noted that Towards The Sinister is about more than revisiting the past. The band is already looking toward original material, drawing on songs Robertshaw was unable to use with his current project, Many Suffer, but believes are well suited to the new lineup:
“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.”
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.”
Stainthorpe‘s final full-length with My Dying Bride was 2024’s A Mortal Binding. His other band, the gothic rock project High Parasite, released its debut Forever We Burn in 2024.
