Parkway Drive; Byron Bay metalcore band’s Winston McCall

I remember being in the moshpit with mates and seeing Parkway Drive on the same stage my school’s awards night was held.

Parkway Drive performing in 2006.

In today’s Review I write about Parkway Drive, a metalcore band based in Byron Bay that I first saw perform in 2005 in the Bundaberg State High School assembly hall. I was 17 at the time, and I have fond memories of being in the moshpit with my mates and looking up to see the band occupying the same stage where my school’s awards night was presented.

Parkway Drive’s decision to play all-ages shows at entertainment-starved regional cities such as my home town is part of the reason it has earned such a large following — not just in Australia but throughout Europe and the US.

While researching this story, I spoke with the band’s songwriter and vocalist, Winston McCall, about the final song on its forthcoming sixth album, Reverence. Named The Colour of Leaving, it is unlike anything Parkway Drive has recorded to date. Its sparse arrangement consists of a clean guitar arpeggio and a string section, accompanied by the occasional sound of a shovel digging into dirt. McCall sings: “I saw death’s face today / As he led my friend away.”

Parkway Drive's Ben Gordon, Winston McCall, Luke Kilpatrick, Jia O'Connor and Jeff Ling. Picture: Kane Hibberd

The timbre of McCall’s unadorned voice stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it, as it was clearly written from a place of emotional distress. The album’s final, spoken words are these: “So we live like we have lost, and we love like we are broken / And as the colour leaves the sky, we’re left in reverence of the frailty of it all.”

When I asked him where this song came from, McCall told me about a series of deaths he has experienced in recent years, including his friend Tom Searle, from British metalcore band Architects, who died of melanoma in August 2016 at the age of 28. “We literally got told about that and then had to walk on to our biggest headline set we’d ever done, at Summer Breeze [festival] in Germany,” he says, shaking his head.

Not long before the loss of his friend, McCall’s dog died of cancer too. “My family’s my wife and me, my cat and my dog; that’s it,” he says. “I go out on tour, there’s people everywhere; I come home and it’s very, very tight. So that was completely gut-wrenching. I was with him, and I watched the being that was my best friend f..king stop being. And The Colour of Leaving was the colour of the sky when the sun was setting, when I watched him die, and I had to dig his grave.”

For McCall, Reverence is a reflection of that challenging time. “It changed me and it changed all of us,” he says. “So that’s why that song is there: it was a song about saying goodbye. We did four takes of that, with the demo guitar track — which you hear on it — and we left it at that. That’s the one take where it’s not me just completely broken down. And then we just tried to create an environment for that music, with a soundscape that did justice to that time.”

McCall is unsure how this track will be received by the band’s global fanbase, which has been conditioned to expect huge guitar riffs, big breakdowns and dramatic lyrics draped in metaphor. Something this bald and bold? It’s new territory for Australia’s most popular heavy band.

“I don’t know if people are going to like this, or listen to it and go, ‘What the f..k?’,” he says. “No idea if that’s going to be a song people skip, or just go, ‘I don’t understand’. But it needs to be there; that’s the bookend.

“And [first track] Wishing Wells is about dealing with grief, so if you listen to the record through, and put it on repeat, the saying goodbye flows straight into the dealing with the grief.”