Parkway Drive

Formed in Byron Bay in 2003, Parkway Drive have released seven full-length studio albums, all on Epitaph: Killing with a Smile (2005), Horizons (2007), Deep Blue (2010), Atlas (2012), IRE (2015), Reverence (2018) & Darker Still (2022) .  Darker Still entered the official German & Swiss album charts at #5, Austrian at #7, Belgian at #11, United Kingdom at #2 (Rock & Metal Chart) & US at #4 (Current Hard Rock Music Album Chart).  In their home country Australia, the band had their 3rd consecutive #1 album on the ARIA chart.

Darker Still, frontman Winston McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 grueling years, 7 critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (six of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows.

To understand that growth is to understand Darker Still, both musically and thematically. Those who thought they had Parkway Drive figured out — the unrivaled energy, the high-octane breakdowns, McCall’s trademark bark — need reconsider everything they know about Australia’s masters of heavy. Darker Still stands as the culmination of a transformative time that has seen Parkway reach new heights of creativity and success by eschewing the restrictive, safe conventions of genre and abandoning their own self-imposed rules in favor of a wide-eyed appreciation of bold new horizons.

This is the Parkway Drive the band have been striving to be for two decades. Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway —redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit.

Memphis May Fire makes anthems for the broken. The four-piece rock band channel a generation’s worth of angst, frustration, and pain, with a focused blend of gigantic melodic hooks and crushing aggression. Even after topping Billboard’s Hard Music Albums chart and breaking into radio’s Active Rock Top 20, Memphis May Fire refuses to sacrifice who they are or the people who made them. In fact, Remade in Misery, their seventh full-length album, is the heaviest Memphis May Fire record yet.

Memphis May Fire confronts crippling anxiety, violence, disrespect, polarization, substance abuse, and overzealous self-righteousness all over Remade in Misery, strengthened by a foundation of hope and renewal at the heart of the lyrics. Tracks like “Bleed Me Dry,” “Death Inside,” “Only Human,” and “The Fight Within” evoke the cathartic bombast of the band’s best-known songs, a return to their roots with the seasoned polish earned through years of touring and making music together.

A new season unfolds for the band, filled with revitalization and renewal. Having worked with A-list producers, cowriters, and in multiple studios to deliver 2018’s eclectic breakthrough, Broken, the band looked backward to move forward. Stripping things down to their core elements, hearkening back to the basement band days when they created the songs their fans cherish the most, Memphis May Fire rekindled the spark within to build a blazing inferno of riffs and inspirational words.

“I couldn’t be prouder of this album,” frontman Matty Mullins declares. “We have melodic songs, with a sense of maturity to them, without sacrificing the energy that we still want to have live.” 

It is the first Memphis May Fire album to be both produced and mixed by Kellen McGregor, the band’s guitarist who co-founded the group roughly 15 years ago. The longtime rhythm section of bassist Cory Elder and drummer Jake Garland inject the songs with infinite depth and focus. Cameron Mizell, who coproduced 2014 fan-favorite Unconditional with McGregor, produced Matty’s vocals.

Mullins enlisted his friend Cody Quistad, guitarist and clean vocalist for the band Wage War, during part of the writing process. Fire From The Gods singer AJ Channer guests on “Only Human.” At the heart of any collaboration is the Memphis May Fire mission: to connect with the brokenhearted. 

“As a band, we’ve always aimed to create songs that make people feel understood and less alone when they hear them,” Mullins explains. “Because that’s what music did for me. Growing up, I had all of this fear, rage, love, and panic. And with the current state of the world, everyone seems to be in conflict with each other, so convinced of their positions. ‘Where do I stand in any of this? How can I learn to be myself and grow as a person without feeling confused and always under attack?’” 

“We want people to have songs they can sit down and listen to, or play in the gym, or driving in their car, and know the world is bigger than it seems,” he continues. “To know they exist in a world with other people that understand that it is okay to be imperfect. That someone else knows your hurt.” 

Memphis May Fire functions as a sonic confessional, in opposition to the dark brokenness engulfing so many in the modern age, an idea stretching back to the band’s first full-length album, 2009’s Sleepwalking. Songs like “Miles Away,” “No Ordinary Love,” “Beneath the Skin,” “Vices,” “Stay the Course,” and “Carry On” account for 100 million views on YouTube and millions of on-demand audio streams. It’s a testament to the energized connectivity between the band and their audience. 

The guys are family to the million-plus fans who follow Memphis May Fire on social media, revered by the people who discovered their early albums in 2009 and 2011; those who made Challenger (2012) the biggest selling debut in the history of Rise Records at the time; and everyone who championed their music since. Unconditional debuted at Number One on Billboard’s Rock, Independent, and Hard Music charts. In 2016, This Light I Hold made inroads into radio while rooted in heaviness. Boasting the singles “The Old Me,” “Live Another Day,” and “Heavy is the Weight,” Broken was a distillation of what the band does creatively, with the group’s signature passion and fearless genre-bending. 

Remade in Misery is the sum total of all that’s come before with a forceful charge into the future. “We wanted to resurrect the rawness, lyrically and musically, that gave us our start as a band,” says Matty. “While maintaining the momentum we achieved with building a bigger audience on recent records.”

In an effort to connect with as large and diverse an audience as possible while maintaining a level of connectivity and intimacy, Memphis May Fire has toured with a vast list of important rock and metal acts that includes Killswitch Engage, Sleeping With Sirens, Black Veil Brides, Sevendust, and Atreyu.

A staple defining act in the heavy music and screamo subculture that’s been so meaningful for so many, Memphis May Fire co-headlined tours with platinum screamo band Yellowcard and The Devil Wears Prada and took groups like Silverstein as support. They appeared regularly on Vans Warped Tour, headlined the Take Action! Tour and earned spots at major rock radio festivals like Rock on the Range and heavier leaning international events like Download, Slam Dunk, and Heavy Montreal. 

“No matter what walk of life you’re from, 2020 took a toll on everybody,” Matty says. “I think there’s never been a more important time for aggressive music; songs people can use to release emotions, whether they are feeling abandonment, or struggling with addiction, or otherwise at an all-time low.”

The unity of purpose is palpable at a Memphis May Fire show, as both the audience and band share their life experiences, dreams, and fears, through the power of transcendent music. As important as it is to see the light at the end of the tunnel, there is a great strength to be gained from a sobering, stark look at how it feels to be in the throes of adversity. Memphis May Fire crafts the sound of hope from struggle, delivered by a dedicated group of men who aspire to something more with their art.

CURRENTS is the new standard for death-infused metalcore. This is emotionally fraught and impossibly angry music soaked in cold, depressive atmosphere. CURRENTS explore the forbidden realms of a tortured psyche, searching for meaning amidst uncertain chaos and venom.

Heartache, physical abuse, abandonment, trauma – no dark emotion is spared examination. CURRENTS also turn their gaze outward, offering no mercy to man-made catastrophes like climate change and animal
abuse. An exploitative system that inflicts such harm upon humanity and the entire world will not be spared the wrath within this explosive, weaponized bombast.

The Way It Ends, the second full-length from the Connecticut bruisers, is a thematic and spiritual successor to their dense, bludgeoning, and smartly constructed full-length debut, The Place I Feel Safest
(2017), and a direct follow-up to the blistering and diverse EP, I Let The Devil In (2018). Those well-versed in Meshuggah, Humanity’s Last Breath, Vildhjarta, and Architects have embraced CURRENTS with full-throated passion. A combination of their contemporaries and influences, channeled through unique perspective and personal experience, resulted in something revolutionary. It’s why they
were handpicked for tours with August Burns Red, As I Lay Dying, We Came As Romans, Fit For A King, Born Of Osiris, and the Impericon Never Say Die! Tour. As New Noise declared: “CURRENTS is a band not to be ignored.”