Northlane enlists Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall for metallic full-circle moment on Miasma
As a teenager, Marcus Bridge was terrified when he first saw the debut music video by Byron Bay heavy metal quintet Parkway Drive — now he’s a core member of the metal community.
As a teenage metalhead, Marcus Bridge was both terrified and inspired when he first saw the ultra-heavy debut music video released by Parkway Drive, a Byron Bay quintet that set the national metal scene alight in the mid-2000s.
Today, Bridge is a core member of that same community: he leads Northlane, one of Australia’s most popular metal bands, and is himself seen as an inspiration for the next generation of heavy music vocalists.
Yet for the band’s upcoming EP, titled Mirror’s Edge, he went out on a limb to ask Parkway Drive’s formidable frontman Winston McCall if he was up for a guest appearance on a song titled Miasma.
“Parkway is the band that showed us all that we could do it; that we could start a heavy band, and tour overseas, and really take this thing seriously,” said Bridge. “We wouldn’t have what we have now without Parkway – so to have Winston on a song is a real full-circle moment for me.”
McCall rarely lends his vocals to other acts, but in this case hearing the request from Bridge and his bandmates late last year was music to his ears.
“They’re friends, and we’ve got a lot of history with them,” he told The Australian. “We’d just done the Monsters of Oz tour in the States with Northlane; I’m a fan of the band, and I’ve always been impressed by their journey.”
Across its 20-year history, as it ascended to become the nation’s leading heavy band on the world’s stage, Parkway Drive has evolved from its metalcore roots to a more traditional heavy metal style; Northlane, meanwhile, now sits six albums into its career at the intersection of technical, progressive metal and electronic dance music.
“They have a very saturated, deep-layered sound, which is incredible; I don’t know how the hell they create that music,” said McCall, shaking his head.
On Friday, Northlane’s national tour starts in Brisbane, with the band close to selling out the 3000-capacity Fortitude Music Hall for its biggest headline show in the Queensland capital, followed by dates in Sydney (Saturday), Melbourne (Sunday and February 15), Adelaide (February 16) and Perth (February 17).
Its Mirror’s Edge EP, meanwhile, will be released on April 12, and will also include a collaboration with another heavy music veteran: Ian Kenny, the frontman of Perth progressive metal band Karnivool, who also leads rock act Birds of Tokyo.
As for the health of the scene today? “There’s a really good thing going on with heavy music in Australia right now,” McCall said. “And Northlane are in the box seat, because they have a catalogue of incredible music already, and they’re still putting out their best material.”
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