Some musicians utilized the pandemic-driven hiatus from live music to set up new records. Parkway Drive vocalist Winston McCall says the break gave him too much time to tinker with the Australian band’s sound.
Parkway Drive broke through the metalcore scene in the late 2000s with an early catalog packed with heavy riffs, blast beats and McCall’s unrelenting guttural growl. The band’s 2022 collection “Darker Still” is a departure.
McCall admits he hoped to create a slightly lighter-sounding album that straddled the genre lines of power metal and early-1990s thrash metal.
“We really wanted to nail down as a sound, which is what you hear and we’re really stoked,” McCall says. “The music had to serve a purpose, and it really had to drive the overall feel of Parkway’s evolution forward; however, executing that goal is where the issues came in.”
“Darker Still” was created in three parts: pure joy, absolute agony and tension.
“There was just a lot of work that went into it. Over the period of creating this album, we were going through different stages of lockdown, different family matters at home, and all kinds of stuff,” McCall says. “And we had a lot of time to create it, which can drive you crazy.”
Some songs saw as many as 60 revisions, he says.
“The first single ‘Glitch’ was literally the song we wrote and it was the last song finished,” McCall says. “It went through about 60 different versions simply because we had too much time.”
However, McCall says that the more intricate arrangements on the record suffered little changes.
“It was weird because there are songs like ‘The Greatest Fear,’ which has more of an extravagant composition. It stayed very similar for the majority of its creation,” he says. “Then some of the simplest songs took a bunch of goes around the merry-go-round to nail down.”
The tune that proved to be the tallest order became the titular ballad “Darker Still.” Guitarist Jeff Ling approached the band early on with the riff, but the full song was a struggle.
“There were certain songs that eluded us for a very long time, like the title track, ‘Darker Still,’” McCall recalls.
“We’d never written a ballad before having to do that. It took us months to figure out how to create that thing, and it went through so many different characterizations and so many different theories.”
The name stayed the same, however, as it describes McCall’s life.
“It’s really strange because that idea came along to me very early on — before we even had an album,” McCall says.
“It came about because of basically the journey that I’ve been going on throughout my life of confronting the reality of darkness. It’s basically about my journey to reaching an age where all of a sudden the people I love have started passing away and I was confronted with the reality of what life is, the idea of dealing with loss, and the idea that it doesn’t ever get lighter.”
Despite the nihilistic disposition behind the lyrics, McCall says recording the album was cathartic. He’s anxious to share it during the band’s first North American tour since 2018.
“It’s always cathartic, and I think there’s a part of me that has to create because it brings me catharsis and the fact that the songs are written as a touchstone for these darker things because I have no other way of articulating them,” McCall says. “Being able to confront and articulate the way that these problems make me feel through song and through lyrics is a very powerful thing.
“I think one of the most powerful things about music is that it gives voice and it gives language to emotions which you can’t bring yourself to express any other way.”
Parkway Drive w/Memphis May Fire and Currents
WHEN: 6 p.m. Wednesday, February 1
WHERE: Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Avenue, Tempe
COST: $39.50
INFO: parkwaydriverock.com, marqueetheatreaz.com
