Almost three years after their brooding and brilliant album Darker Still, Byron Bay brawlers Parkway Drive are back with brand-new music in the form of Sacred, an all-out rager that encapsulates their entire career. Coming as the band look back on 20 years of raising hell across the world, Winston McCall reflects on the importance of time well spent and never wavering from that eternal forward motion…
Winston McCall appears just about ready to explode. Generously carving out time to talk to Kerrang! at the end of his day and the start of ours, he sits behind the desk of his home office in Byron Bay, all biz about the prospect of the stacked calendar ahead. So much so that the Parkway Drive frontman is fizzing like a shaken-up soda bottle, struggling to keep the cap on his excitement at the “million balls” he’s been busy juggling lately.
Today alone, that’s meant singing lessons, a trip to the gym, prepping a 64-piece orchestra for this summer’s fancy pants show at the Sydney Opera House, and overseeing final edits on the video for the band’s brand-new single, Sacred, the fruits of which you should have already enjoyed by the time you read this.
In a sense, this is Parkway Drive’s idea of taking a beat. This is Winston, guitarists Luke Kilpatrick and Jeff Ling, drummer Ben Gordon and bassist Jia O’Connor trying to do things differently. Who can blame them, either, considering the near career-ending troubles endured getting last album Darker Still over the line in 2022.
All of that’s before we even get into the logistical minefield involved in transplanting their mammoth 20th anniversary tour to UK arenas later this year. Or the multitude of other plans the singer “can’t let the cat out of the bag” about yet.
The only thing we can say for certain is that there’s more where Sacred came from, maybe just not in the way you might ordinarily assume.
“We’re not sitting on an album right now,” Winston is quick to clarify. “But it’s not going to be the last thing you hear from us. The passion for creating and the idea of what we’re going to do going forward is there, ready to be done,” he adds, grinning his trademark grin, carrying the air of a man enjoying the game of choosing his words carefully.
“We’re just approaching the creative process in a different way. That means we want to approach the release of the art in a different way as well. We want to be able to just give people something. It’s a different thing when you focus solely on one small piece of art as opposed to 10 pieces that all connect. It leads you down a completely different path. We leaned into that, because we’d never done it before. There used to be a lot more rules [about this]. Now it’s almost like the Wild West.”
Luckily, these wily gunslingers bring more firepower than most, even 20-plus deep in the game. With its barrage of beats, chunky riffs, breathless delivery and carpe diem spirit, Sacred plays out like a single song greatest hits capsule of Parkway Drive at their chaotic best. It’s a notion that their frontman finds absolutely hysterical.
“I’m fucking stoked that that’s the way it’s come across!” he says, eventually gathering himself from all the guffawing. “That’s exactly what we wanted. We had this idea to give people the thrashier, heavier end of Boneyards and Idols And Anchors mixed with the metalcore thing that they’re used to, plus the massive anthemic vibes of Vice Grip and the crazy soulful lead sections in Darker Still, along with all these other random little bits thrown in. But, like, all in one go!”
Digging deeper into the concept of the song, its title, and offering context to the breakdown-heralding rallying cry of, ‘I’m gonna live my life where eagles dare’, the frontman sheds some light on where his head’s at as he looks out at the world around him right now.
“It’s a reaction to the times,” he shares of Sacred’s source inspirations. “I feel like the world is becoming more and more dominated by negativity. It’s negativity for the sake of profit, too, whether people realise that or not. The drivers of negativity create profit and that’s a very addictive cycle.
“We’re spending our lives wasting time,” Winston continues, “fighting battles over trivial things and making each other feel worse and worse. It seems harder to cut through with something positive, but it doesn’t have to be this way. I believe that everyone can be more than what they’re told they can be. You don’t have to rely on anyone but yourself. Time is all that you have. It is the most sacred thing that you get in life. It is the one thing that you can't get back, so be conscious of it.”
“We’re spending our lives wasting time, fighting battles over trivial things and making each other feel worse”
Though it wasn’t strictly a catalyst for the song itself, this line of thinking suddenly reminds Winston of a meme you may have seen about how medieval peasants worked 150 days a year because the Church believed it was important to keep them happy with frequent holidays. The kicker being that in the modern, supposedly more progressive era we live in, we have nowhere near as much free time.
“If you spend more time in an office job than medieval peasants used to just trying to survive, how much fucking progress have we really made?” he grimly posits. “It’s so rare that you hear of something that frees up time to experience the world around you. Everything’s going so much faster for the sake of speed. It’s progress in terms of our ability to consume, fight, offend and be nasty but only to serve, like, ‘What’s the worst way we can monetise this thing?’ Or, ‘How can we suck someone in and get them addicted?’
“It’s not the most articulate way of putting it, but fuck that shit, go the fuck outside!” he urges, ramming home the point echoed on Sacred’s equally uncompromising missive. “You can do better for yourself. I believe you can. This band was built on adventure, on experience and people gave us the ability to feel fearless in what we do. Everyone else deserves that, too. Don’t waste your time.”
By his own admission, this message of positivity is something of a rarity in the wider Parkway catalogue. Sure, there’s defiance in abundance wherever you look, but the kind of outright fist-in-the-air affirmation found on Sacred? A collector’s item.
Whether it’s a sign if things to come remains to be seen. Even by Winston, seemingly.
“I’m not sure yet,” he says with a shrug of the shoulders that underlines just how much work and exploration of new material remains. “The interesting thing is I’ve got tons written and the other guys have too, but we’ve still got to form it all. There’s a huge amount of aggression – positive aggression – coming out of me now, though. There’s still goals, still imagination, and the tank for doing it just keeps filling up.
“Tapping back into that has lit quite a fire inside of me,” he teases. “Playing a bunch of the older songs on the 20-year tour shows [in Australia last September] has as well. It definitely sparked something; I love that riding-on-the-edge feeling. I think this song’s just the start of it, to be honest.”
Considering the depths and difficulties Parkway Drive let the world in on during their promotional duties for Darker Still, fans will be heartened to hear how markedly different things appear to be in the camp these days. In taking a moment to pause and reflect on their journey as part of last year’s initial round of 20th anniversary celebrations, Winston found himself falling in love with the band all over again.
“I’ve never spent more time onstage looking at my mates and going, ‘Fuck, man, look what we’ve made here. This is sick!’ And they’re just smiling at each other, too. There’s points that we reach in the show which are designed to be very personal for us and for that to resonate. It always hits home.”
Going back and dusting off some songs for the first time in a while awakened something important that had lain dormant, it would appear. It’s an effect he likens to turning on an old games console and impressing yourself by “remembering how to pull off all these special moves” on the controller.
“The concept of time is fucking insane,” he acknowledges of the warping and distortion caused by doing all of this looking back. “To feel the muscle memory and emotion come flooding back to something that you haven’t touched in a long time, all of a sudden you reconnect and feel the spark again. You get a new appreciation of it. It’s like having new ears.”
Though he wryly laughs at the fact they’re still celebrating that two-decade milestone a couple of years on from their actual, official inception, the ongoing nods to Parkway’s impact and legacy remains no less a trip.
“It really doesn’t feel like 20 years, man,” Winston admits. “That’s just an insane amount of time to be doing anything. We’ve always operated forwards, we never wanted to be a band that goes to nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. We want people to know that this is not the end for us (laughs).
“We grew up in the band constantly expecting it to end, waiting for the penny to drop where all of a sudden it’s not cool anymore, so, ‘See ya later!’” he adds, pulling the curtain back on one of the band’s past insecurities. “We always wanted to prove that everything had this forward momentum. Doing a 20-year anniversary tour was the first time where we’ve ever been like, ‘Wait, let’s have a celebration!’”
“We’ve always operated forwards, we never wanted to be a band that goes to nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake”
With it, a host of memories have come back to the surface, vivid and stark in their contrast to the successes enjoyed as a result of not only surviving but thriving in spite of all odds, perceived or otherwise.
As Winston looks ahead to the upcoming UK shows this winter, he can’t help but be reminded of their first trips and how different things were back then. Said tours used to mean lugging heavy gear up narrow flights of stairs in Bournemouth. Or sleeping on floors while house parties raged through the night. He remembers being sick in the car in the pouring rain before playing to 10 people in Nottingham. There have been lifelong bonds formed, a long list of things best not repeated, and so much fun had along the way.
Some tough lessons were learned, too. Stopping to take stock of it all has been instructive in many ways, offering fresh perspective on the good and the bad.
“In this band’s history we’ve always felt like underdogs,” he says with characteristic cheer. “We grew up with giant targets on our back for every single thing. We were fucking surfer boys. We played metalcore, which became the butt of every fucking joke. Nothing we are or did ever fit into the box it was supposed to.”
Now, Winston and his fellow surfer boys from Byron Bay can legitimately lay claim to being the kind of band that others look up to. Haters gonna hate, but staying true to the core of who they are and what they do has made far more people relate. He’s especially proud of how the trail they helped blaze has seen fellow countrymen and friends in Polaris, Northlane, Speed and Thy Art Is Murder follow suit. Although far too modest to share the kind compliments people have paid over the years, there is one bit of credit he is willing to accept on the band’s behalf.
“Parkway has been a gateway for so many people in Australia getting into hardcore or metal,” he concedes. “We opened the door to this kind of music for a whole generation of people. We didn’t mean for it to be like that, but that’s what happened. It’s lovely when people say nice things about us, but that means more to me than anything.”
According to recent data, the average Australian marriage lasts between 12 and 13 years. Following that same logic, Winston should probably be a couple of bands in by now and deep into midlife crisis territory. So, what’s the secret to keeping Parkway together for 20 years and counting?
“Sheer determination to begin with,” he says, before taking a moment to consider exactly how to phrase his next point. It’s an understandable pause, given the underlying delicacies exposed in recent years.
“And then trust that allows for vulnerability,” he settles on. “That’s the thing which we learned. Because the determination only got us so far. That led us into a zone where there’s cracks, resentment and everything grows and festers there. Unless you have the vulnerability and the trust to be able to communicate, shit breaks.
“It can be challenging, it can be confronting, and it can be difficult,” he confesses. “But you’ve got to be vulnerable. You’ve got to be able to trust people to do that, too. Luckily, everyone in the band has been at that same place and they had the courage to trust. That’s been the key.
“Standing for something better than what we’ve been takes work,” he adds of the ever-evolving process. “It takes work to know yourself and have the openness to be vulnerable about that. This is the shit that should be taught in schools!”
“It takes work to know yourself and have the openness to be vulnerable about that”
In lieu of a pastoral reform of the Australian educational system, those cautionary words will have to do. Even Parkway need to fall back on those lessons from time to time. They still meet with their counsellor Sean (“He’s a fucking legend – he literally saved our band!”) when difficult situations arise. The mental health work that started on the Darker Still campaign is just as important in the present moment, especially if there is to be any hope of seeing this thing through for many more years yet to come.
“Sometimes you need a third party,” Winston asserts, “to be able to give you the space to work around those things. Having the courage to go, ‘Someone else needs to be in this dynamic to help it come unstuck.’ That’s actually a good thing. It’s not embarrassing and it’s not a fucking weakness.”
Could things have been better? Sure. Would Winston go back and change a single thing to make it so? Not a chance.
“In hindsight, everything in life could be a bit rosier,” he says, taking a bird’s eye view of the past 20-ish years. “But if everything was all roses, would I be the person I am today? And I’m really happy with the person I am today. It hasn’t been easy, but things aren’t supposed to be. The joy of life lies in the unpredictability and the surprises. The hard shit always makes the shiny parts even shinier.”
In that case, hard as the road ahead may sometimes seem, shine on, you Aussie diamonds.
Sacred is out now via Epitaph Records. Parkway Drive tour the UK this October – get your tickets now
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