Parkway Drive made effort to scale back sound

Parkway Drive say they had to modify their sound on fifth album Ire.

It’s out on September 25, and frontman Winston McCall reveals if they had continued to play faster, heavier music, it would take away what makes the band tick.

He tells ToneDeaf: “The whole record, the whole idea of it was change. Early on we felt we had written four albums, which we really loved that were written to a very specific formula and with the same goals in mind: to be faster, heavier, harder the whole time.

“Once it came to making a new record, we felt if we go faster we are going to start creating noise that we don’t want to create – we are going to start losing aspects of the band that we love, we’ll lose the melody, I’m going to have to sing even lower and there’s going to be no humanity left.”

He continues: “We felt we had achieved what we wanted to achieve with that sound. We wanted to try doing other stuff with the same goals that we had originally when starting but using them in a different way.”

McCall reveals he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a metalcore outfit and instead wants the band to create their own identity.

He adds: “Being able to make this record hit certain tones that we haven’t hit before and go to certain places which didn’t rely on blunt force trauma to create was a massive thing for us.”

Parkway Drive will head out on a European tour in January, including four UK dates.

Ire tracklist

  1. Destroyer
  2. Dying To Believe
  3. Vice Grip
  4. Crushed
  5. Fractures
  6. Writings On The Wall
  7. Bottom Feeder
  8. The Sound Of Violence
  9. Vicious
  10. Dedicated
  11. A Deathless Song
Scott Munro
Louder e-commerce editor

Scott has spent more than 30 years in newspapers, magazines and online as an editor, production editor, sub-editor, designer, writer and reviewer. Scott joined our news desk in the summer of 2014 before moving to the e-commerce team in 2020. Scott maintains Louder’s buyer’s guides, scouts out the best deals for music fans and reviews headphones, speakers, books and more. He's written more than 11,000 articles across Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog and has previous written for publications including IGN, the Sunday Mirror, Daily Record and The Herald, covering everything from daily news and weekly features, to video games, travel and whisky. Scott's favourite bands are Fields Of The Nephilim, The Cure, New Model Army, All About Eve, The Mission, Cocteau Twins, Drab Majesty, Marillion and Rush.