Sauce

Fans of Byron Bay metallers Parkway Drive don’t really need another reason to appreciate the band’s much-anticipated follow up to Killing With A Smile. That said, they should be pretty thankful it happened, because, as Winston told me ahead next month’s Hobart show, there was a point where they didn’t ever think it would …

Congratulations on Horizons … How are you feeling about it now? Is it relief? Or are you still excited? Where are your emotions with it, now?
I’m really excited about it. Basically, I’m excited about the whole thing, because I haven’t seen the finished product. Like, I’ve heard the songs, which I really, really like, and I’ve seen the artwork, but I haven’t seen it all put together. To me, the whole package of an album is different from just having the sound or the visual kinds of things. I like having the whole package in my hands. So I’m kind of psyched to see that, but I’m just interested, really, to see how it goes, because it’s been a while since we put out the last album, and I’m just wondering if kids still remember us! [Laughs] Yeah, it’s going to be interesting, I guess. I’ve got about two months to sit on my hands until it comes out, and then I suppose those questions will be answered.

Yeah – there must be a little bit of anxiety mixed in there as well.
Yeah, kind of. I guess [it’s] not so much anxiety as just … curiosity, I guess! [Laughs] It would be nice if it did go well, but it’s not the first thing on my mind. I’m just interested to see what people say, just because we never thought we’d be in the position to write two albums, let alone be backing up an album that went really well. It’s just a strange position to find ourselves in.

Did you think that before, [with] Killing With A Smile, that that was going to be it?
Yeah, well … [Laughs] When we actually wrote Killing With A Smile … I remember when we finished recording, and we were literally saying, “I don’t think we could write any more songs,” because we just did it all on that album! We just wrote as many songs as we could, and we didn’t think we would be able to do anything after that. And then, kids started to like Killing With A Smile, and it kind of blew up, and … [Laughs] we put ourselves in the position where we were going to have to write another album! Which was a really, really awesome thing for us to be able to do, which was cool … and by that time, I think we were ready to write more music, which was cool.

I’ve asked a hardcore fan of yours if they knew why the band was called “Parkway Drive”, and they didn’t, so I’ve got to ask you – why is the band called “Parkway Drive”?
It’s basically … well, not basically – it is the name of the street that our drummer and our tour manager/merch guy live on. They’re brothers, and there’s basically a house there that their dad and family built over the years, that they let pretty much every hardcore band that came out of Byron jam at and hang out at. And at some point in time, in most of our lives, that place has been home to us. When we started the band, we wanted a moniker that meant something to us, rather than just a bunch of words; it meant something to us, and had a place in our hearts, and that was it, because it was kind of “home”. So what better thing to have, I guess!

How do you feel about listening to your own music? And how often do you listen to Parkway Drive in everyday life?
I haven’t heard Killing With A Smile, the recording, in, at least, over a year, which is interesting! [Laughs] I never go out of my way to listen to it, but I find myself listening to Horizons a fair bit, just because, I suppose, it’s new music to me. I don’t know, I kind of like it. I guess I’m not bored with it yet. It might change. I find when you’re playing the music night-after-night-after-night for however many … I think it’s been a couple of years now that we’ve been playing the songs off Killing With A Smile; we must have played each of them a hundred times. Like, the last thing you want to hear is that music when you’re not playing it, because you know you’re going to get sick of it at some point in time. Yeah, I guess that’s the answer to that! [Laughs]

What’s changed about the band since Killing With A Smile? What do you think we can hear that’s changed about the band?
Um … I’m not quite sure. Hearing-wise, the sound of the band … the sound we’re trying to aim for on Horizons has been one of more focus. As opposed to changing the sound that we have, and changing the way we go about things, it still sounds like Parkway Drive; we just tried to focus things in the way that we tried to make the fast bits faster and crunchier, and the heavy bits heavier, and the melodic bits more melodic. We just tried to make everything the best it could be, in what it was trying to do. Like, if you’ve got a heavy bit, you may as well make it as heavy as you can, and if there’s a melodic bit that’s going to sound nice, you may as well make it sound as melodic and nice as you can. That’s kind of what we tried to do on this album.

Killing With A Smile you recorded and put together in just a couple of weeks – how did the recording process for Horizons differ to that?
To start with, we had a bit more time, which was great. I think we had about twice as long, which was really, really awesome. And also, because we worked with Adam again, we were going into the recording process knowing what to expect, and instead of having just a week of fumbling around, not knowing what the hell we were doing, we got down to it straight away, which was really good – which took a bit of pressure off. I guess in the time since we recorded the last album as well, both ourselves and Adam, who have progressed a little in the way we do our certain things – us playing music, and him recording – I guess the music came out a bit easier, and a bit different from last time. And also Adam’s producing skills have gone through the roof since we recorded Killing With A Smile. That’s basically the difference! [Laughs]

That must be really nice – growing together.
Yeah, it is! The whole band … when we started the band, we kind of just aimed to do something that we hadn’t done before … being from a hardcore background, we wanted to write something really heavy, and a bit more challenging and technical and metal-sounding. And as we’ve kind of gone on in the history of the band, we’ve just tried to progress and maintain that same attitude; keeping ourselves amused while we’re trying to achieve these goals. So everyone’s kind of evolved at the same time, which is really, really awesome.

What’s so significant about the track Horizons that you would actually name the album after it?
It kind of went the other way around, actually! [Laughs] Well, not really … We named the album Horizons, and then I wrote that song Horizons, so it shares the same title … but I think that the title of the CD being Horizons is more meaningful to us than the actual song named Horizons, simply because, for us, when we named the album, we didn’t really … have a consensus on what we wanted to name it – everyone had a whole bunch of different ideas, and no one was agreeing. And, at the time, I think we were in Germany or Holland or something like that, touring around, and I just had the idea to call it Horizons, simply because that’s all we’ve seen since Killing With A Smile; we’ve just been five guys heading towards the horizon in every direction. We’re just driving or flying or doing whatever, but that’s all we see, is horizons, and it kind of sums it up perfectly for us. We kind of went with that one, and I think it reflects the band, especially at this point in time.

And what stands out about your European tour?
I think for most of us, especially me, touring Europe, and touring the band, totally changed my view on a lot of things in life, just because we’ve seen so much and experienced so much in the time we were over there that it was amazing. Like, playing shows, and playing the music in another country, where you can’t even speak the same language or read what they write, and having people go absolutely crazy and still singing along, is an experience I never thought I’d have in my life. So it was really cool.

Parkway Drive play Hobart’s Brisbane Hotel on the 14th of October.

Listen to an MP3 of the full interview Below