Ashenheart Break-Up

Those of you who follow me and/or @Alex Loach on BlueSky and/or Instagram likely are aware that Ashenheart broke up on Saturday, June 27.

The path to the break-up was convoluted and complicated, but I wanted to write something to process my thoughts and feelings on the situation. I also hope to provide some sort of summary of the situation for people who were less aware of things as they unfolded; or simply don’t use BlueSky or Instagram and are therefore not tapped into the goings-on.

Some background on Ashenheart first. The band began as a solo project for founder Amanda Kauffman. When Ashenheart became “public”, she held auditions for a vocalist, which led to Alex joining the band. They released the debut album Faded Gold and it was successful. Well-received by critics, a strong fan reception, with sold out cassette and CD runs.

I was a fan. I really enjoyed what they did on Faded Gold, and enjoyed promoting their music on (at the time) Twitter. The “metal scene” on Twitter (and subsequently BlueSky) is fairly tight-knit. It doesn’t take long for people involved in that bubble to get acquainted with one another and become friendly, so naturally I eventually became friendly with Alex and Amanda.

I invited Alex to do guest vocals on the @Am I in Trouble? song “Black”. Alex and Amanda subsequently invited me to contribute guest acoustic guitars to the Ashenheart song “House of the Daemon”.

Soon after, this led to them inviting me to join Ashenheart, making my membership in the band official with the October 4th, 2024 release of the single “House of the Daemon”. My role was diverse and interesting. I played keyboards, did sound-design, played acoustic guitar, played all of the guitar solos, and added backing vocals and clean vocals.

Soon after “House of the Daemon”, we set forth working on the EP Tales From Eternal Dusk released by Fiadh Productions.

It was an enjoyable experience. Since Ashenheart had begun as a solo project for Amanda, the band dynamic was established that Amanda wrote the songs in the band, which was freeing for me Every other band I’m involved with (except now @Wince and Frisson which I only recently joined so isn’t relevant to the time that this was all happening) I handle a lot of the song writing and lyric writing (in some cases, all of it). Being in a band where songs and lyrics were written by someone else, and I just got add my parts afterward, was fun. I often equated it to “someone brought me a fully-baked cake and asked me to decorate it”.

We released the single “Empire of the Necromancers” on January 17, 2025, and the full EP Tales From Eternal Dusk on April 18, 2025. Again, it was well-received. It garnered good reviews, led to some fun interviews, had a sold-out cassette tape run on release day.

On May 20, 2025, it was announced that Tyler Blake from @Fathomless had joined Ashenheart as bassist. Amanda had begun writing a second full-length, but at the same time, the band was quietly going into hibernation, as Tyler was working on the second Fathomless full-length, and Alex and I were working on the @Eveale full-length, and Amanda was also working on a solo album.

Now, for people who were not on Twitter, and subsequently now on BlueSky, Amanda Kauffman had a track record of intermittently sharing posts about woes in her life. They varied from medical bills, automotive bills, dental bills, posts about losing her job and being at risk of eviction, posts about her family members having medical bills that she was paying for. These posts were always coupled with pleas for mutual aid. There is a strong circle of mutual aid in the metal community, and I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s built on trust, and a “pay-it-forward” mentality. However, the longer she was active on the “Metaltwitter / MetalSky” community, the more it became clear that she only took. I can not recall ever seeing any instances of “pay-it-forward”.

Unfortunately, the longer Amanda was active in the community, the more people became suspicious of her mutual aid pleas. Too often she would share posts requesting financial assistance, followed by posts showing off new high-end, expensive guitars that were “gifts from a rich relative” or a “gift from a friend”, or expensive Warhammer figurines, or expensive gaming PC set-ups. Many people felt uncomfortable with this, but many who were suspicious ultimately tried to give the benefit of doubt; holding onto hope that perhaps she’s just not good at managing her finances… perhaps these improbable circumstances and contradictory coincidental events are true. But it became increasingly difficult not to ask myself “why not just sell one of your ten $3,000 guitars, rather than asking people online for money?”.

Regardless of how troublesome this snowballing history of questionable events was, out-right accusing her felt like it was based on speculation. Many people who became too uncomfortable with her behavior simply blocked her and quietly removed her from their lives. Nobody wanted to the “bad guy”; the person who blatantly called her out, because what if they were wrong, and they suddenly seemed cruel or vindictive?

Whenever Ashenheart would have decent sales on our music, Amanda would coincidentally be going through one of these woes. Alex and I foolishly tried to be kind and all-too-often convinced ourselves that we are both comfortable enough in our lives, and that she should use band income for her own personal financial problems. Ultimately, by the end of the band, she had taken everything. She had the gall at points in the past to post screenshots from the “Bandcamp For Artists” dashboard showing off how much money the band had made— at one point somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000. She took it all. I don’t know what the final total was.

Since she started the band, the band account was in her name, and she alone had access to it.

Every other band or music project I’ve ever been involved in has operated with the approach of: all band income goes into the band account, and that money is only used for band expenses. Nobody “cashes out” or gets paid. A band is a business. I even run Am I in Trouble? this way, despite it being my own solo project where 100% of the stake is mine.

Things began coming to a head when Amanda began posting about her wife, Grace, who was ill with cancer. She started a GoFundMe, to which many people donated large sums of money. Her wife passed away. Then she started a GoFundMe to raise money to have her wife’s remains shipped to China (where she was allegedly from). She had an incredible knack for continuously coming up with “plausible-enough” reasons to always be raising money.

Ashenheart released our final release, the single, “Tears Wept to the Sea”, in honor of this wife, with proceeds being donated to the American Cancer Society.

This was a significant turning point in my and Alex’s discomfort reaching a breaking point. We already had concerns and suspicions, but still ultimately felt like they were based on speculation and paranoia. We convinced ourselves that we would try to keep things going and just establish firmer rules. When money was being raised for the American Cancer Society donations, we pressed Amanda hard to ensure that she shared receipts publicly of every donation. To her credit, she did share some receipts, but even then, it started to taper off, and with whatever limited access I did have to Ashenheart financial records, it appeared to me that the amount of money coming in for the song did not match up with the amount of the donations.

This past weekend (Saturday, June 27, 2026), it was brought to my attention that prior to this wife, she had allegedly had two prior wives who also both died of cancer.

Unfortunately, we allowed things to drag on much longer than they should have, but Ashenheart activities were quiet. We were all thoroughly busy with other things in our lives, and other bands and projects. Of all of my bands, Ashenheart was the most “all business” band. We rarely chatted just for fun. Most chatting was just about the band, and that was it. Amanda rarely discussed her “personal life” woes and issues in the band chat, so many of the more farfetched and blatantly false things she had begun posting on social media, the rest of uscompletely missed. I rarely scroll through BlueSky reading whatever posts appear on my feed. I didn’t actively seek out her posts, so I simply missed many of the more egregious ones that occurred more recently.

I learned this weekend (Saturday, June 27, 2026), when the truth finally came spilling out, that she apparently had started a second account on BlueSky in recent months, in an effort to break into the Vtuber community. Seemingly, that community caught wind of her grifting and dishonesty fairly quickly and swiftly turned their backs on her. On this second BlueSky account, she had apparently been posting within the past few weeks that she now had another wife, who yet again, was dying of cancer.

If you’re completely new to this situation and reading this while your head spins and your thoughts repeatedly say “what the f**k?”, I would compel you to read the following two posts on BlueSky from people who were also deeply involved in this situation:

Post by @tallesteden.bsky.social — Bluesky - this one is particularly important, as it comes from someone who knew her much longer ago, and provides a lot more historical context to the deceptive, manipulative behavior.

Post by @soulmass218.powerupwithpri.de — Bluesky - this post by Lux Edwards was the tipping point, to which I am incredibly grateful, that they had the bravery to finally blatantly, outright call her out by name. I do not fault anybody else who chose to quietly block her and not “stir the pot”; it’s a scary thing to consider outright pointing your finger and accusing someone of such heavy stuff, but I commend Lux for being brave enough to do it.

There’s so much more that I could probably say, and maybe I’ll come back to this post and add to it someday. But for now, I think it’s covered the situation fairly adequately.

It’s difficult to face this situation. To look back on all of her actions now through the lens of “hindsight is always 20/20” and not feel like an idiot. It all seems so “obvious” when it’s all laid out at once, and so many other people have shared stories and details that I was never even aware of.

She hurt so many people— us in Ashenheart, people who considered her a friend, other music collaborators (I’m so sorry for those of you who contributed to her solo album; that you devoted your time and talents to something that hopefully she does not have the audacity to release now), people from the Vtuber community, visual artists who worked with her for music releases.

I’m sorry that any credibility and trustworthiness that Ashenheart had potentially passed down to her. If even one person had their doubts about her, but then thought “she must be trustworthy though, if Steve works with her”, I’m so deeply sorry.

-Steve
Monday, June 29, 2026