“Darker Still” by Parkway Drive

Winston McCall has described “Darker Still” as being related to the Parkway Drive’s belief that, most simply put, the world is coming to an end. That is what is meant by the phrase “the night grows darker still” which, in McCall’s own words, points to the concept of ‘things getting worse and worse and worse’.

And most of the time when we come across such gloom-and-doom tracks, that idea manages to be relayed pretty effectively. But in this case, it appears that the artists also tried to flip that notion into some kind of romantic context. So instead of more generally reading as if the singer perceives the end of all that is, he rather comes off sounding a lot like a vocalist who is trying to perpetuate his relationship with the addressee but appears pessimistic in terms of said goal actually being reached.

Parkway Drive

Parkway Drive is a metalcore act from Australia whose existence dates back to 2003. The makeup of the group, which has remained pretty consistent since day one, features the following:

• Winston McCall (vocalist)
• Jeff Ling (guitarist)
• Pig Kilpatrick (guitarist)
• Pie O’Connor (bassist)
• Gaz Gordon (drummer)

To note, Parkway Drive has proven enduringly popular down under, and their four most-recent studio albums, 2010’s “Deep”, 2012’s “Atlas”, 2015’s “Ire” and 2018’s “Reverence”, all placed within the top 40 of the Billboard 200.

As of this writing, Parkway Drive is on the verge of dropping its seventh studio album via Epitaph Records, whom they’ve been affiliated with pretty much from the jump. 

“Darker Still”

“Darker Still”, which appears to have been officially released on 23 August 2022, is the title track from the band’s seventh studio project. 

Winston McCall has noted that this LP is akin to a culmination of all he and his bandmates have gone through artistically in the nearly two decades they have been together.