Ten thousand feet in the air, hanging off the side of a plane over Lake Elsinore, California, it hit Parkway Drive vocalist Winston McCall that he’d probably made a terrible mistake. When the Australian metalcore band had pitched the idea of skydiving for the music video for Vice Grip, the first single from their fifth record, Ire, they hadn’t actually expected director Frankie Nasso to take it seriously. None of them had ever done a skydive in their lives, they only had a week and a half before they were due to be in Canada to record the rest of the album and, to top it off, Winston was deathly terrified of heights. Why hadn’t they just gone to a deserted warehouse like every other metalcore band on the planet?
Thank God they didn’t. Winston might have spent the entire shoot paralysed by fear, but he acknowledges it was worth the pain. Vice Grip is easily Parkway’s most memorable, badass video. Featuring the band freefalling through the air before coming together in a sunset-lit formation, it’s a bat-shit crazy, hair-raising visual statement. At one point, Winston screams the song’s rallying cry: “One life, one shot… GIVE IT ALL YOU’VE GOT!” before he and his bandmates throw themselves out of the plane into thin air.
“It was the most rushed, psychotic lead-up to actually recording an album that you can get,” remembers Winston.
In the run-up to the shoot, the band undertook a five-day crash course that enabled them to perform the jumps without an instructor. The aerial shots were filmed by Joe Jennings, the skydiving cinematographer who choreographed stunts for films such as Point Break and XXX.
“We weren’t actually supposed to be doing any of that stuff on the certification that we had,” Winston recalls. “We just had some really good people on the crew that were like, ‘No, fuck it, just go for it.’ You’re not supposed to be getting that close to each other. You’re definitely not supposed to be in formation.”
A do-or-die metal anthem about overcoming your fears, Vice Grip represented Parkway Drive jumping headfirst into a new future. Not only was the track a volte-face from their anthemic but serrated metalcore, it would set them on the path to becoming one of modern metal’s heavyweight bands.
“Vice Grip was literally the biggest turning point in the band’s existence,” Winston says. “It defined the next era of Parkway, it was the starting block for everything that’s come after it.”
With their first four albums, Parkway Drive had risen through the ranks of metalcore, with a lean, gleaming sound that was instantly recognisable. But when they started writing the material that would eventually become Ire, they found themselves at a crossroads. The sound that had made them one of the scene’s most beloved bands had started to feel claustrophobic.
“Vice Grip was the first thing we started writing after we finished [2012’s] Atlas,” Winston recalls. “It sounded like old Parkway; that middle breakdown that you hear [in the finished version] was actually the main riff for the entire song. It was just this beatdown-heavy song, and we were like, ‘OK, this is sweet, but it’s basically just another step down the same path.’ It was the feeling of looking and going, ‘I swear I’ve been here before.’”
The band had started making gentle tweaks to their sound on Atlas, but had stopped short of anything that would truly alter it. “We wanted to push further in a different direction,” Winston admits. “But people kept telling us, ‘Don’t fucking do it. They’ll crucify you.’ At the same time, I watched a lot of bands that didn’t take risks stay in the same place. We were going off gut and heart.”
Lead guitarist Jeff Ling took the plunge first, playing around with ideas that would change up their formula. “He sent Ben [Gordon, drums] and I a message saying, ‘Don’t freak out, but I’ve done work on that song, and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard from us,’” remembers Winston.
Bringing the lead guitar unashamedly to the forefront, spiky metalcore had been replaced by straight-up arena rock, with massive riffs and trench-like grooves. It was a song that demanded to be played in huge venues.
“I remember sending a message to Ben after, saying: ‘Dude, I can’t get that riff out of my brain,’” says Winston.
Before long, the band had added a huge gang chant chorus, a monstrous breakdown, and verses that saw Winston almost rapping his delivery. That anything-goes attitude and energy set the tone for the rest of the album. From the slow, menacing stomp of Crushed, to the clean melodies of A Deathless Song and gorgeous strings on Writings On The Wall, Ire was full of surprising turns, in a committed revamp of the signature band’s sound.
“There was a lot of 90s in there,” Winston muses, explaining how the diverse influences that fed the album were reflective of the band’s personal tastes. “You can hear everything from Metallica to Rage Against the Machine, to Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Red Hot Chili Peppers. We tried to steer clear of anything super-contemporary at that point in time, because we wanted to make something that was not of the time.”
When the music video for Vice Grip premiered on June 8, 2015, to say some fans were upset would be a bit of an understatement. Sure, there were those who bonded with the song’s audacious swagger from the off, but plenty howled their displeasure into the void, dismissing the track as “generic” and “mainstream”. The band, who were doing the European festival circuit, watched as their YouTube feed turned into a binfire of negative comments.
“It looked like Armageddon,” Winston hoots, recalling the ‘RIP Parkway’ comments. “‘This band are dead, no one wants them anymore.’” “But here’s the thing,” he adds with a grin. “We knew that song was going to fucking crush.”
The next day, when they played it live for the first time in Lille, France, the singer noticed a few fans singing along, a number that would increase the following night. By the time the band reached Greenfield Festival in Interlaken, Switzerland, on June 11, Vice Grip had become the biggest moment of the set.
“We’ve never had a song explode like that one did,” Winston says. “For all of the controversy, fucking hell, that thing just laid waste to that festival season for us. I was still watching the firestorm go on in the comments, like, ‘No, sorry, don’t believe everything on the internet.’”
The impact Ire had on Parkway Drive’s trajectory was substantial and immediate. Released on September 25, 2015, it was the band’s most successful record to date, hitting No.1 in the ARIA chart in Australia, No.23 in the UK album chart and No.29 in the US Billboard 200. At the same time, the band’s live shows were bumped up into bigger venues.
That cycle, they played London’s Brixton Academy twice and packed it to the gills both times. Their broader sound demanded production to match: on the Ire 2016 tour, the band’s live shows became beefed-up, fire-bombing extravaganzas that featured a spinning drumkit. Parkway the potential festival headliners had arrived.
“Ire was the first time that we had exponential growth of that size,” Winston says. “By the end of the run, we’d added a spinning drumkit. Word got out: ‘Parkway are doing some wild shit now.’”
Since then, the band have continued to expand their horizons. In 2018, they followed up Ire with the bombastic Reverence, which saw them introduce gothic synths on slow-burner Cemetery Bloom, with Winston performing album closer The Colour Of Leaving acoustically backed by violins. In 2022, they released possibly their most divisive statement yet with the dramatic, intricate and less immediate Darker Still.
“[After Ire] I don’t think there’s anything actually holding us back anymore,” Winston acknowledges. “I think we really have pushed so far that we have the truest understanding of our identity possible.”
One thing is for certain: every flame, spark and glitter cannon Parkway Drive have ever set off can be traced back to Vice Grip - the biggest risk the band have ever taken, and the one that’s paid off the most.
“It’s strange to think that at some point in time people didn’t associate it with the band, because I think it’s probably the number one thing you do associate with us now,” Winston smiles. “It’s a genuine anthem, and everyone looks forward to it [when we play it live]. It was the start of everything, and I can pinpoint it all back to rewriting a song into something that felt so new. That was the moment where genuine ambition had the courage to take the steering wheel.”
Parkway Drive play Sydney Opera House on June 9 and play arenas in the UK from October 4. For the full list of tour dates, visit their official website.
