Aaron Stainthorpe is officially no longer part of My Dying Bride

Aaron Stainthorpe’s departure from the British doom metal band My Dying Bride has been confirmed, as reported by theprp. After abandoning their 2024 tour because of “a profound sense of discontent among the band members,” the group started touring with Mikko Kotamäki from Swallow The Sun as a guest vocalist, suggesting that the writing has been on the wall for a while. Since then, interviews have discussed the increasing gap between Stainthorpe and the band. My Dying Bride announced their separation from Stainthorpe in a statement posted on their social media accounts on October 9.

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.

Andrew Craighan praised Mikko Kotamäki’s attitude.

Well, he was chosen because we found ourselves vocalist-less, if that is such a word. I have to admit, we didn’t know quite how deeply Aaron’s solo aspirations were — let’s politely put it like that — which I kind of understand. People, you get to a certain age and you wanna make things happen and you wanna make ’em happen quick. But obviously it had an effect on us. We were left without a vocalist. And we weren’t ready for it. We didn’t have a plan — well, mainly because we didn’t know. And so we found ourselves in disarray, but we were sort of shocked at this. So once we’d got over the shock and we realized we really didn’t have a vocalist — [Aaron’s] got his new band, and it sounds like he’s putting another band together as well to enhance his solo career — we had to find a vocalist. And I think it was either Neil and Shaun or the combination of Neil, Dan and Sean, who were very fond of Swallow The Sun and they know Mikko’s history, ’cause I think Swallow The Sun, very early in their early career, were influenced by My Dying Bride. So he knows us. He knows what My Dying Bride is, he knows what the ethos is and he knows what it’s about. He won’t have any delusions of grandeur because he knows where My Dying Bride come from and where we presently are. And then the most important thing, we looked at his vocal range and his death metal’s different to the way Aaron would sing it, but his vocal range is very much what we needed. So we thought, ‘We’ll try that guy first.’ And he just said yes. And it was that simple. And then within a couple of weeks of him saying yes, we flew him across to Halifax and we had a meal and a meeting and we did some rehearsals and it was just easy. It was really quite something.