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MUSIC FEATURE

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Parkway Drive (L to R): Jeff Ling, Jia O'Connor, Winston McCall, Ben Gordon, Luke Kilpatrick

INTERVIEW

There's only one guarantee in the trajectory of Parkway Drive, and that's that wherever their metal magic flows, it goes with purpose. Frontman Winston McCall shot the breeze with us about why his band is determined to keep shedding its skin, in conversation about unmissable new album Darker Still. Read the full chat online at stack.com.au. Words Zoë Radas WINSTON MCCALL PARKWAY DRIVE

Darker Still by Parkway Drive is out Sept 9, including on JB-exclusive opaque red vinyl, via Parkway Records/Sony.

to sing – ten years ago now – the goal was to execute a song like Darker Still . I was like, ‘One day, I want to do this; this is a place that I‘ve never been able to go because I don‘t know how to sing.‘ This time the pieces were there, and we were like, ‘This is too hard, let‘s just make a Parkway banger out of it.‘ But it wasn‘t living up to its potential. “When we started putting it together we said, ‘This thing goes for seven-and-a-half minutes, it‘s too long!‘ But then – ‘No, it has to be that long.‘“ Even the band‘s decision on where to put it within the tracklist was considered – it is designed to “slap [listeners] in the face“ when it arrives. “People will go, ‘Whoa! Didn‘t see this one coming!‘ And that‘s the idea,“ McCall explains. “It‘s a switch-up in the plot of the album. So, there is no safe space of ‘Ahh, Parkway are doing that thing they‘ve done on an album before.‘ Nup! Question everything, until this entire experience ends.“ There was another challenge hiding in the wings for Winston himself, and it was physical. Take one look at the video for slamming single Glitch , and you‘ll see how much has gone into creating affecting, emotional visuals for the album‘s ‘dark night of the soul‘ concept. “It f-cking sucked!“ McCall laughs of the clip. “And I wrote the treatment...“

“P ush harder, do more“ – this was the maxim behind Parkway Drive‘s incendiary new album, and seventh for the multiple ARIA-winning Byron Bay act. “It was like, an ‘end-of-the-world‘ album,“ says frontman Winston McCall of the twisting and haunting Darker Still .

with Jimmy Iha abandon, epic choral choruses, and some of McCall‘s most bewitching ever storytelling. If you want to get straight to the heart of this enormous record, however, you must bend your steps to the title track; it‘s the longest song on the album, and

revolves around a persistent, plaintive, ill-boding spaghetti western whistle, which emerges like a sonic gunslinger. “The riff came from Jeff [Ling, lead guitarist], and he got a friend to come around and whistle one day – he was a good whistler,“ smiles Winston. This track is also the embodiment of McCall‘s drive to

“Like, ‘You‘re probably never going to play this on stage; it could be the last thing I ever write‘. The [pandemic had] distilled the creative

Question everything, until this entire experience ends

process down in a way which it hadn‘t been,

previously. So, what do you do? There was no reason to step back from working really hard on every part of it, making sure it was fulfilled, making sure the songs that we couldn‘t execute previously, we worked on until we understood how to execute them.“ Darker Still is laced with immense technical prowess: forked-tongue guitars which wheel

reach toward the music he wants to make, no matter how long it takes. “We tried to write this type of song on Ire [2015], and we tried to write it on Reverence [2018],“ he says. “Literally, when I first started learning how

Continue reading the full interview online at stack.com.au

72 SEPTEMBER 20222

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