Australian metalcore titans Parkway Drive have announced their upcoming record, Darker Still, set for release this coming September. Their record will be the group’s seventh full-length, following on from 2018’s Reverence. Alongside the announcement comes a surprise drop for their latest single, “The Greatest Fear“, which bears a six-minute epic of a music video, traversing all the locations expected from a metalcore video: rocky beach, desert, forest, field.
“The greatest fear, the one we all share; this song is about the unifying force we all must face —death,” says vocalist Winston McCall. “The goal was to create a song that saw death not as something that separates, but something that connects us all on our paths. Musically, we wanted to create a song that did this concept justice. It’s heavy, it’s epic and when it stomps it leaves an impact.” Parkway certainly have a particular narrative and aesthetic direction in mind with this latest release, with previous single “Glitch” providing an exploration of the sleeping mind.
According to McCall, Darker Still is the culmination of their musical talent and experiences as a band, the realisation of the shared ideas that were envisioned when Parkway Drive first formed in 2003. In that time, they have gone from metal underdogs to undisputed festival headliner, releasing undeniable metalcore staples in the form of “Horizons” and “Deep Blue” and expanding their commercial appeal with “Ire” and “Reverence“. This brings us to 2022, where Parkway stand alongside wider metal acts such as Pantera as much as their metalcore contemporaries.
With Darker Still, the band are set on widening their musical and thematic horizons further, exploring, as McCall puts it, ‘the dark night of the soul’, the point at which one’s beliefs and self-perception are irrevocably challenged. “What you hear on Darker Still is the final fulfilment of our ability to learn and grow catching up with the imagination that we have always had,” the vocalist concluded.
Darker Still will be released September 9th via Epitaph Records. You can pre-order the record here, and view the tracklist and album artwork below. For a full review of Darker Still and further news on Parkway Drive, stick with Boolin Tunes.
- Ground Zero
- Like Napalm
- Glitch
- The Greatest Fear
- Darker Still
- Imperial Heretic
- If a God Can Bleed
- Soul Bleach
- Stranger
- Land of the Lost
- From the Heart of the Darkness