Parkway DriveWhile the Byron Bay act were perhaps initially in the right place at the right time to capitalise on a burgeoning new wave of metalcore acts that were gaining traction in the mid-'00s, Parkway Drive have now transcended sub-genre tags to become one of heavy music's biggest players.
There's not many bells and whistles associated with the band - other than the live show's production values - and no celebrity angle, marketing gimmicks, clickbait headlines or obvious aesthetic element that you can attribute their longevity and international success to. Instead, their popularity seems to largely stem from a loyal following who embrace a consistency of output, both live and on record, as well as their honesty and strong work ethic. For Parkway Drive, the music is the selling point.
"We've never tried to be anything other than the music," vocalist Winston McCall explains as he sits down with The Music during an extensive press junket that will take him to three continents. "We're just people. I've never been captivated by the concept of celebrity in the first place, so trying to create it is just dumb. The whole culture of celebrity to me, especially of people just playing music, is really strange. I love the fact that people connect with what we do and enjoy it. And that is an amazing reward, and creates such an amazing sense of community, and it gives me so much to think that what I've created does something for someone else, and that we're sharing a moment.
"As soon as you have a gimmick to break that tension or connection, or a sense of celebrity, then it becomes about something else. For whatever production we do, the essence of that stays the same. We just did shows in Europe, these secret gigs which were, like, 200-people capacity. It was just us on stage and the music.
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"That concept translates from 200 people to 100,000 people at Download. Everything that goes off around it heightens things and changes things, but it's that person-to-person relationship which will never leave the band."
After the sold-out reception afforded their recent heritage tour celebrating the anniversary of their second record Horizons (2007), the quintet could have returned to the roots on their next release. Instead, buoyed by the success of 2015's Ire, they've doubled-down on the less conventional path for new effort Reverence. That means strings and choirs, and McCall engaging in rapping, gravelly spoken-word passages and, yes, clean vocals, alongside the arena-levelling jams. "The strings were composed by our producer George [Hadjichristou] and our friend Greg Weeks, who did stuff on Ire. He brought his friend [in] to play violin and the violin she played was an original Stradivarius, so it was worth, like, five million dollars," McCall laughs. "It was fucking psycho!"
As for the new material, he insists that they have all grown as people so the type of music they wanted to create is aimed at "affecting different areas of different representations of us, rather than just, 'I'm young and like fucking fast music and adrenaline, and that's it'.
"I started [getting singing lessons] before Ire. But with Ire I wasn't at the point, and we weren't at a point as a band, where we could rely on my ability. The melody was still carried by the guitars, and any stray from the regular path on Ire vocally was dictated and written to the guitar melody and to the guitar concept. Whereas this record, the delivery of the vocals was influenced by the lyrics, the tone and the themes. And I could actually have the ability to write melodies and concepts, and then bring them to the writing sessions and say, 'I've got this idea,' and we'd build around that, which influenced the way the guitars and everything else came out. So it was just another element that we've put in, which was different. It was really fun to do, because it's allowed a lot more - it's broadened the palette vastly. But the whole idea of the album was just creating different character and different points of interest. We just wanted it be something that constantly took you to a place that was interesting and engaging."
The 35-year-old is an instantly amiable interview subject, but appears visibly uneasy discussing the new LP's bleaker lyrical perspective. "If you look at the past few years in the world, it's a pretty dark place to be on the whole. Children getting beaten in custody, Nazis on the streets, police brutality, abuse within the church and corruption at the highest level - all of those broader strokes of society that we've been exposed to that's coming to the front.
"For us personally we had friends and family diagnosed with cancer, very close to us, which we had to deal with; like try and process and deal with how that would affect each other, and us as a band, during the actual treatment and then during the loss. It was really tragic, just really fucking tragic. It's been the most intense, defining point of my life has been the past three years and that probably goes for other people, because we were forced to confront things that we never... Forced to confront the idea that sometimes things don't get better," he pauses. "And sometimes it's not beatable. And loss is what it is. When someone's gone from your life, it's crushing. That's what these lyrics were written in, in that point in time."
The singer admits it's been onerous even discussing this topic while doing press because he didn't fathom how raw it still felt. "There was a point where everything kinda went to hell, and these events have continued happening for me for the past three years. In one of the earlier interviews I did I was like, 'Yeah, it was cathartic to write the lyrics,' but, to be honest, it wasn't. I don't think it was cathartic; that's just what came out. Because, at the end of it, it hasn't made me feel any better or get any closure or anything like that. You're still left with this raw wound; you've just got a bigger space of time between when that wound was inflicted."
On a more encouraging note, some time after a US trek and packed European summer schedule concludes, an Australian tour is also imminent. "It's coming. And when it comes, it's big," McCall grins.
Reverence (Resist/Cooking Vinyl) is out this month.
