WACKEN, GERMANY - AUGUST 03: Australian singer Winston McCall of Parkway Drive performs live on ... [+] stage during the third day of the Wacken Open Air festival on August 3, 2019 in Wacken, Germany. Wacken is a village in northern Germany that has hosted the annual festival, which attracts heavy metal fans from around the world, since 1990. (Photo by Gina Wetzler/Redferns)
Australia’s own Parkway Drive are an undeniable force in the current heavy music landscape. Having earned their stripes in the early 2000’s metalcore scene, PWD have since gone on to become a household name within modern metal and possibly take the throne as the genre’s next heavyweight headliners. With their 2015 album IRE, the band embarked on this ambitious journey to go beyond their metalcore roots and aim for a sound that resonates with larger audiences and consequently bigger venues. However, the band’s formidable drive would only be fully realized with their 2018 album Reverence, which eventually led to them headlining one of the biggest metal festivals in the world, 2019’s Wacken Open Air. Now nearly three years later, Parkway Drive have channeled all this momentum into what’s undoubtedly the most important milestone of their career — their seventh studio album Darker Still.
Provided all the success the band’s seen over the past two album cycles, it was inevitable that Darker Still would be the band’s climactic return, especially considering the album’s conception was during the world wide pandemic. However, to no one’s expectation it was almost the band’s breaking point as well. This past spring PWD were set to hit the road on a highly anticipated North American headlining tour featuring the likes of Hatebreed, The Black Dhalia Murder, and Stick To Your Guns. A month before the tour started PWD posted a statement announcing the cancellation of all dates and that they were taking time to work on internal issues as a band and as individuals, but they reassured fans that their return would “burn brighter than the past.” To that end, today marks the official release of Darker Still and if there’s one thing for certain it’s that the future does in fact look brighter than ever for Parkway Drive.
In speaking with Forbes, Parkway Drive frontman Winston McCall details the conception of Darker Still and why it ended up being one of the most difficult and triumphant periods in their 20 years as a band.
WM: It’s hectic [laughs]. It’s pretty weird because with not having done a tour for three years you realize what momentum actually means in the sense of muscle memory and having systems in place that you were used to operating in, and going from a full on cold start back into touring mode, essentially we’ve never done that ever. We’ve just been going and building momentum from day one, so this is pretty nuts trying to get it all started again and get it all back to the place where it actually was, which is pretty insane in the first place. Then at the same time we have a record rollout going on as well, so everything is just going at 100 miles per hour. Our brains are fried but in a good way, we’re really really excited. The reality of how much work goes into it was kind of lost on me previously when I was doing work.
WM: There was definitely an intent. Basically when we finish writing a record we immediately know what we want to start doing the next time. We know what we liked about the previous work that we put down and also what we hadn’t achieved and what doors we hadn’t walked through. We had already said we’re only going forwards and Reverence (2018) was an experience of creating something sonic where we’re like, we love the steps we took forward but we’re still going to continue going forward, this isn’t the end point. Then COVID hit and that was the circuit breaker for music in general. That was the thing where all of a sudden you didn’t even have time to focus on any kind of art, like the first couple of months was ‘oh my god the world’s going to end, reassess your entire life.’ So when we finally came back on the other side of it it took us six months of easing into this thing and the reality of ‘it’s going to be a couple years before we’re going to be touring again,’ and then the interest for writing took hold.
That gave us a perspective that we’ve never had before which was essentially there’s an actual chance life is never going back to normal, the music industry is never coming back, you have the funds to make one album but you can’t guarantee anything after that, and you may never get to go on tour again, so what music do you want to make? And coming back to the point of we want to go forwards, it was like not only are we going to go forwards but we’re going to commit 100 percent to growth outside of the boundaries of what we’ve done before. We had a very long time to do that so there was basically no excuse for not writing something that was a big progression for this band’s sound. We always keep the roots where we’ve kept them in the first place, but the more that time goes on the more it spreads out and this was the one where it was just like ‘right, we’re going over there and we’re going to make sure that we reach that destination.’
WM: We had the gift of ‘you’ve got all the time in the world.’ When you’re used to writing in a touring grind with an album every few years amongst touring, you have a different way of writing. You’re going to have a small amount of months to coordinate and put everything together and let the whole thing congeal, but all of sudden there was an open end to it which was like “wow, freedom!” We found that after a year there was this pressure we had put on ourselves, or at least Jeff [Ling] (guitars, PWD) put on himself to chase. When you’ve got unlimited time there’s no excuse, like ‘right, it’s got to be perfect,’ but perfect is a changing concept. All of a sudden you lose focus on that and you hit something that’s awesome, but after three months you’re like ‘I could do something that’s better than that,’ and you forget the fact that that’s already good. Songs would change and change and one song would get worked on for 18 months when it was kind of great in the first place, and by the end of it you’re like ‘this is a completely different song,’ and what we had in the first place was a good song and we spent eighteen months reworking this thing for no reason sometimes. So it f**ked with us in a bad way and also provided us freedom in a good way, but it was definitely a lesson in self regulation and time management. It wouldn’t be possible to write this record in any other timeframe other than what we had, but at the same point in time coming out of it we were like ‘woah, that took us down some rabbit holes that definitely weren’t healthy.’
WM: This basically flows on from the recording process. Basically by the end of the process Jeff [Ling] was really burnt out. Like mentally fried. The dude is responsible for all of the recordings we do before we even get into pre-production, like we write in his basement and for every 3 hours we spend jamming he spends 10 hours just obsessing over this s**t. And that’s in his house, and while this was going on we’re all in lockdown, we can’t go anywhere, and [Jeff’s] got really young children and he’s got a bunch of family commitments going on, like a lot of really gnarly s**t going on in his life in the middle of a pandemic, which was just stress on top of stress of getting this s**t done. Then actually recording the album involved us having to fly our producers into the country because we couldn’t leave the country, and they had to go through two weeks of quarantine prison here and then trying to get a studio that was up to the task in our hometown...it was a f**king nightmare.
When we got to the end of the recording process Jeff was fully cooked and just like ‘I’m done, I need a break with this, we need to address some s**t’ because he was like ‘I’m literally a broken human.’ And we were like “right, we got a tour in a months time, who’s psyched for tour?” And no one was actually excited, and we’re like “this is not right,” and Jeff was like “we have to do something, we shouldn’t be feeling like this. Everyone is stoked on the album but there’s something fundamentally wrong here.” When we started talking about it we were basically like the recording process pushed us all to the point of stress within each other’s fields outside of what we do within the writing-playing aspect. Every single person just felt 19 years of resentment and under appreciation of each other and it built up to a breaking point. The communication lines were just completely down and it was just like f**k, we didn’t even know how to connect and how to talk properly because by this point in time we’re like ‘I worked my ass off on this!’ ‘Yeah well, I worked my ass of on this, and no one’s told me I’ve done a good job and you weren’t there for me’ and I’m like “f**k, alright what do we want to do?”
Everyone wanted to keep doing this band just not like this, and everyone wanted their friends back. So we’re like “what are the options?” The options are we do the same thing we’re doing which we’ve already acknowledged is going to destroy the band, and we go on tour and pray that it’s a situation that works, but there’s no f**king way that this is going to work, the band was going to explode. Or, we cancel the tour and we start therapy, which is what we did and what we’re still doing. Through that it’s been a journey of realizing what communication means and what it takes to connect and reconnect and acknowledge each other and what this journey has done for us because it’s just a wild trip being in a band, let alone this long.
It’s a very interesting and isolating way to exist, and we had isolation within isolation because of the systems we put into place due to the growth of the band over the years, and we never really acknowledged how much of a toll it took because it was just relentless drives forwards. We constantly felt like if you weren’t going forwards the wheels would fall off and you’d be left with nothing, you’d go back to being the f**king bums that you were in the first place and now couldn’t even provide for your family. Yeah so it was all of that and we chose just to be really honest about it in terms of it being quite black and white, because we acknowledged how much it meant to us with how lost we were feeling as people and the fact that we needed help to give us direction and to help us at this stage of our life. If we can advocate for that and be an example for that then that takes something positive out of a hard situation, and hopefully it provides an example for other people.
WM: Yeah, well it’s a combination of both because how we’ve always operated is we’ve basically had a five year plan in place for a long time. I don’t know where the saying came from but if you don’t know the step that’s coming after then there’s no point in walking forwards in the first place, you’re just going to end up in a dead end. With all of that planning it did lead to a relentless nature, but it was more the acknowledgment of the work and the communication that goes into it which was the issue. For us it’s been about putting systems in place so that we can all stand each other and commit in an equal way to what’s going to come forward, because we all love what we’re doing, we all love being on stage and creating this art. It’s the emotional development and the core connections between us, the really personal stuff which kind of fell through the cracks and the work side of things steamrolled over.
When we look back at it it’s understandable. It’s that thing with hindsight of ‘f**k we should have done things different,’ but at the same point in time it’s been a wild ride, you don’t get taught this stuff anywhere. It’s not like someone’s ever like ‘hey you’re going to encounter this this and this, you need this kind of mental development and we should all be acknowledging each other and learning how to communicate, otherwise you’re going to get into some pretty deep s**t down the line.’ Now I’m looking at it and I’m like yeah it’s understandable why we’re here. So yeah we’ve got systems in place and we’re still working with our therapist. We literally have a plan in place so we can keep the connection that we have going on tour and have our meetings to check in with each other and keep that bond tight and keep the lines of communication open, and if all goes to hell we can literally jump on a Zoom meeting with him and figure it all out.
WM: 100 percent, and it’s nuts that it’s taken 20 years because if you look at hip-hop or EDM you see someone put out a debut album and then the next year they’re at the top of the billings on festivals and the hype train is relentless. Rock and metal doesn’t have that type of culture but it wasn’t always that way. If you look at Korn, Limp Bizkit, and the era of Nu metal and the grunge era before that, bands all of a sudden just went ‘boom’ pop-culture explosion. I think this genre of music has been out of the limelight in terms of pop culture and it’s been harder to justify taking the slot of a legend because honestly you kind of can’t because you need the grounds of pop-culture behind it. I think that is slowly changing and several years ago we realized that there’s no reason not to go for that because why the f**k not?
At this point in time it took a worldwide plague to stop the momentum of this band, so yeah we 100 percent have that in our sights, and I don’t think there’s any reason that should stop anywhere. It’s not something where we’re like we ‘deserve’ anything in particular, but we grew up as band with zero ambition and we talked ourselves down for ten years like “we don’t know why we’re here, we’re a bunch of idiots, we can hardly play our instruments,” like “this is all luck.” After ten years I sat back and I looked at it like “that’s bulls**t, we’re not doing ourselves justice and not only that we’re holding ourselves back” because you need to back yourself, and once you put the combined energy of aspiration behind yourself you can achieve so much more.
There’s something in Australian society called ‘Tall Poppy syndrome,’ and it’s a well known thing where basically we don’t like someone thinking that they’re good. If someone is like “I’m pretty good at this,” Australian society is like “shut up you w***ker.” So it’s really interesting going to the states because it’s the opposite thing, when someone is succeeding they’re just like “yeah, go get that, well done!” And in Australia if someone does that they’re like “wow, what a f**king d**k head, he thinks he’s better than all of us.” So you grow up with this fear of sticking your head above anyone else because like the tall poppy, it’ll get cut off. It leads to this thing of downplaying yourself and it’s just rooted in us, and it’s taken a long time to have the confidence to just go ‘no, you know what we know our s**t, and we’re aiming for something and if you want to get behind us, great.’ It doesn’t mean that I’ve got my head up my ass but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to compromise ambition and vision for the sake of fear.