PARKWAY DRIVE // Excerpt: Evolution, Rage & the Courage For Change

Read an exclusive excerpt from our Parkway Drive cover feature, only in Issue #35 of Hysteria Magazine.

Flashback to 2013. The Parkway Drive boys are at the Download Festival in England and they’re watching Till Lindemann and his crew of fire-breathing, treadmill-walking madmen absolutely destroy the crowd. “It was one of the most incredible live shows I’ve ever seen,” Winston McCall says.

“Like, none of us are Rammstein fans, but we walked up there and watched for about an hour and a half as a band put on a show in a foreign language to 100,000 English people and have them all in the palm of their hands. They absolutely destroyed it. The music was so fucking heavy, not the same kind of heavy we’re used to where you just play it fast and make breakdowns, we were all banging our heads and just going ‘this is ridiculous’. We all were watching from different points of the stage and when we met up afterwards we realised that their set is what’s possible if you have a vision to create something more than a small, insular scene.”

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After doing Atlas and 10 years as a band we were like ‘OK, what are we going to do next?’

[WINSTON]

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The seed for change was planted. But before Parkway would move ahead they would reflect on where they came from. Their 10-year anniversary tour they scheduled for later in 2013 would give them the perfect opportunity to take stock of where they were coming from, and get a better idea of where they could go with Ire.

“That tour was fucking amazing. We got to play all of these songs that we hadn’t played in ages, and it was so fun and so well-received, but at the same time it made us look back and see that in the past when we were going to do the next album and we had these exciting new styles or concepts that we were bringing in, doing this tour made us realise that those were only baby steps. And we didn’t just want to keep making baby steps.

“After doing Atlas and 10 years as a band we were like ‘OK, what are we going to do next?’ And we had no passion to try and do the same formula again. We finished Atlas and normally we’re thinking next time we can do this or that, and we’re excited to go faster or heavier, but this time we realised that we’ve gone as fast or heavy as we wanted to go. We’d made it as intense as we wanted to make it, we’ve written… god knows how many breakdowns. We wouldn’t be able to put out an album like that and put passion and integrity into it. That sound is as done as it could be for this band.”

WANT MORE? READ OUR PARKWAY DRIVE COVER FEATURE FREE FOR YOUR DEVICE!

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Read our review of Parkway Drive’s epic Festival Hall gig here!