Australian metal juggernauts Parkway Drive will drop their seventh album, Darker Still, on September 9 via Epitaph Records. The record is their first full-length release since 2018’s Reverence and and is now available for pre-order. Today, the band also shared the video for the title track.
The song is unlike anything you’ve previously heard from Parkway Drive — it’s a monumental song in scope, with career-defining performances all around. “Darker Still” creeps to life with a whistle and an acoustic guitar. From here — for close to seven minutes — the band takes the listener on a sweeping odyssey through guitar solos, ethereal choirs and strings, and a surprising vocal performance from Winston McCall.
He has this to say about the band’s latest single:
“Love. Time. Death. The great defining elements that make up our existence. This song begins with the simplest of human sounds and represents these elements as the musical journey grows to reach its souring crescendo before facing the inevitable conclusion of its journey. The night grows dark… darker still.”
Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 grueling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums, three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows.
“When Parkway originally started out, we all were trying to push ourselves to do more than we possibly could,” McCall explains. “What you hear on Darker Still is the final fulfillment of our ability to learn and grow catching up with the imagination that we have always had.”
To understand that growth is to understand Darker Still, both musically and thematically. Those who thought they had Parkway Drive figured out — the unrivaled energy, the high-octane breakdowns, McCall’s trademark bark — need reconsider everything they know about Australia’s masters of heavy. Darker Still stands as the culmination of a transformative time that has seen Parkway reach new heights of creativity and success by eschewing the restrictive, safe conventions of genre and abandoning their own self-imposed rules in favor of a wide-eyed appreciation of bold new horizons. “There are compositions and songs that we’d never attempted before — or, to be more accurate, which we have attempted in the past, but not had the courage, time or understanding to pull off,” McCall reveals.
This is the Parkway Drive the band have been striving to be for two decades. Guitarist Jeff Ling says it best:
“I’m really proud of what we have achieved together, and feel that as musicians, we have really ascended to new realms of class and ability.”
Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway — redefined and resolute, focused in mind, and defiant in spirit.
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