The adage that great art comes from great pain is as much a truth as it is a cliché. In the late 2010s,
My Dying Bride have been put through the emotional wringer, and it shows on their 14th album,
The Ghost of Orion. After 2015's
Feel the Misery, singer
Aaron Stainthorpe's five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. He immediately curtailed band activity. She went into remission in 2019. In the interim,
MDB signed with Nuclear Blast. Even as guitarist
Andrew Craighan wrote new material for their label debut, the band lost two members: drummer
Shaun Steels was replaced by
Jeff Singer, and founding guitarist
Calvin Robertshaw quit by text. Further, when the time came to record,
Stainthorpe felt so out of it he considered asking
Craighan to replace him temporarily.