The Sound Of Rebirth: Celebrating Ten Years Of Parkway Drive's Landmark 'Ire' Album

By 2015, Byron Bay metalcore superstars Parkway Drive found themselves at a crossroads: continue down the path that had made it Australia’s biggest heavy success story, or “break free from the shackles of metalcore” and shoot for the stars – and risk alienating their global fanbase. 

The band chose the latter – and embarked on one of metal's most extraordinary “second acts”, one they’re still arguably riding the wave of.

Its first decade had seen Parkway Drive become comfortably the biggest metal export Australia had ever seen.

From mythical tours across the high school halls of regional Australia to establishing a firm following in the markets of Europe, the US, Asia, and South America, Parkway Drive had gone from DIY road dogs to a bona fide live powerhouse, thanks to their unrelenting combo of Hatebreed-style aggression and Killswitch Engage-inspired dexterity.

The band’s first trio of records – Killing With A Smile, Horizons, and Deep Blue – all followed this formula, making it one of the few bands keeping the “metal” element firmly within metalcore.

But by 2012’s Atlas – a record that still commercially saw the band land in the top 50 on both sides of the Atlantic, it was hard to escape the sense that maybe it was entering a bit of a holding pattern.

There were two trump cards, however: The River and Wild Eyes.

On The River, Parkway leant into experimentation and made space for clean vocals for the first time, as well as female voices.

Wild Eyes, meanwhile, was a four-minute slab of stadium-sized metalcore, built primarily around guitarist Jeff Ling’s anthemic guitar lick.

It was a simple piece of songwriting that, in a post-game analysis of the band's sound ahead of the writing sessions for Ire, was seized upon.

“We had to work out what functioned in the band, and we knew that our melodies came from the guitars, so we wanted to make sure that we maximised that impact that the melody had, to make sure it carried, which a lot of the time meant taking the drums back a bunch”, frontman Winston McCall told Metal Hammer. 

“We reassessed how we wrote songs so that those melodies will shine, so that everything can drop back and the guitar lines will be simpler.”

Making room for more melody wasn’t the only new approach the band took into writing Ire though.

“Every single step of the way, whenever there was a gamble to take, we took the biggest one we could,” McCall said upon the album's announcement.

“None of us would get creative fulfilment by writing another Parkway metalcore album," he continued.

“It was a really odd point to be at; we didn’t want to stop what Parkway was about, but at the same time, there had to be a different way of doing it. It took a hell of a long time to get our heads around what that actually meant.

“If (Ire) isn’t the album that can go further than anything we thought was possible with this band and this type of music, that’s fine, but we can’t go back from this as far as we’re concerned.”

Speaking to Kill Your Stereo ahead of the record's original release, McCall explained how the completion of Atlas had left him wondering whether or not he wanted to continue in the same vein. 

Upon speaking to guitarist Jeff Ling, it was discovered that this was becoming a common feeling within the group, with drummer Ben Gordon also feeling like something of a shift was needed.

"We had no idea what to do," he recalled. "It turned into one of those things where we knew we didn’t want to do the exact same formula because it wasn’t creatively fulfilling for us, but, at the same time, we didn’t know what we wanted to create, and we knew we didn’t want to kill everything we loved about the band. 

"So we started to search and that’s when we found out what we wanted, and we had to commit to going outside the formula that we have been sitting on for the last 10 years. 

"Every time we fell back on the old formula we were bored by it, so this had to work," he added.

The band got to work on Ire with its front-of-house engineer George Hadjichristou at the production helm.

“We thought it was more important having someone we are super comfortable with, knows our sound, and knows what works live,” Gordon said of the unorthodox decision in 2018.

Parkway Drive unveiled the first slice of their new record, Vice Grip, in June 2015.

Gone were the thrashy passages, blast beats, and crushing, turn-on-a-dime breakdowns.

Instead, a stadium-sized mid-tempo stomper greeted the expectant crowd, alongside a video clip of the band launching themselves from aeroplanes (a somewhat convoluted representation of the band's ‘leap of faith’).

Parkway had gone more melodic. But would they also go heavier to complete the press release cliché bandied by so many of their contemporaries?

The next single – Crushed – answered that question with an emphatic, fiery ‘yes’.

Coming out of the gate with the heaviest riff of its career, Crushed meshed Rage Against The Machine's groove with nu metal aggression, resulting in one of Parkway’s simplest – but most exciting – songs to date.

Its explosive video clip also set the visual template for the band's future live shows.

The seeds of the idea were sown when members watched a similarly explosive show from German metal weirdos Rammstein at the 2013 Download Festival in England.

“None of us are massive Rammstein fans, but it was the best show I’d ever seen,” McCall said of the experience.

“We all watched it and were like, ‘Did you guys all just experience the same thing?’ Because it was an experience, and that is what heavy music is capable of. 

“Everything worked together; the music, the production, it all worked so fantastically to engage 90,000 people who didn’t even speak the same language – and they play slow, simple riffs! That’s what this shit is capable of, and if we wanna do something different and of that calibre, then why the fuck not?”

It would take a few more touring cycles beyond Ire for the band to finally bring similar levels of pyromania to life onstage – as evidenced by their current 20th anniversary tour – but if it weren’t for Rammstein and Crushed, there’s a high chance none of it would have come to pass.

Across the rest of the album, Parkway further enhanced their experimentation – most notably on the spoken word-led Writing On The Wall (the first time McCall had bought a song into a writing session) and on ‘core’ power ballad of A Deathless Song, which found its complete form on the deluxe edition of the record with extra vocals from Tonight Alive/Heavenshe frontperson Jenna McDougall.

But at its heart, Ire was a great record due to its humongous slabs of metalcore, such as the frantic Dying To Believe and setlist staple Bottom Feeder, both featuring some of McCalls's most outrageous vocals on record.

Commercially, Ire was a huge success, landing at number 1 in Australia and cracking the top 30 in the US and UK. 

From a critical point of view, it also underlined the fact that Parkway Drive had embarked upon something special. For lack of a better word, it showed maturity – something which would be felt far and wide.

"What is apparent is the way Parkway has developed both as song writers and as instrumentalists," a review of Ire from Kill Your Stereo said in 2015. "Where previous outings like Killing With A Smile saw guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick frantically shred away at every riff they could, Ire shows control mixed in with the chops."

It set the stage for a new phase of the band's career. The live shows continued the group's evolution, showing a group ready to take on the world stage.

"This is a different version of Parkway Drive and it is very impressive," read a 2015 review of the Adelaide leg of the band's Australian tour. "The days of fake stage waves and costumed crowd surfers are simply a part of the band's past now; instead, pyrotechnics and stadium metal near anthem levels are the name of the game."

This rise to stadium metal status culminated in a stupendous performance headlining Germany's Wacken Open Air festival in 2019 in front of 80,000 metalheads (immortalised on the Viva The Underdogs DVD).

That performance came on the touring cycle for Ire’s follow-up Reverence, a wall-to-wall collection record of Vice Grip-esque festival bangers.

Parkway Drive has since transcended even greater heights – from headlining the iconic Sydney Opera House backed by a symphony orchestra to Gordon teaching A-listers like Chris Hemsworth how to play drums (for Ed Sheeran, no less).

But Parkway's rebirth, and subsequent conquering of the global metal scene, began with – and owes a lot to – Ire.

In the ten years since its release, Parkway Drive have again surpassed all expectations.

God knows what the next ten years will hold…