Parkway Drive to feature on ABC’s ‘Australian Story’

Parkway Drive will be at the centre of ABC’s next Australian Story, with their episode – aptly titled ‘Getting Heavy’ – airing in just a few days.

• READ MORE: On The Cover – Parkway Drive: “It felt like a sledgehammer had been taken to all of our worlds”

It comes as the 24th episode of the docuseries 27th season, and will air on the ABC – with a simultaneous release on YouTube and the ABC’s steaming platform, iView – on Monday (October 17) at 8pm AEDT. Parkway shared a trailer in the lead-up to its airing, showing clips of the band speaking candidly about the inter-personal struggles they faced making their just-released seventh album, ‘Darker Still’.

At one point in the preview, bassist Jia O’Connor says jokingly: “We’re in a heavy metal band – we’re not meant to be softies, talking about our feelings and stuff.” At another, guitarist Luke Kilpatrick quips that he “might lose some friends because they’ll see [him] cry on TV, but that’s fine”.

See the trailer for Parkway Drive’s episode of Australian Story below:

Parkway Drive recently opened up on their struggles with NME, guitarist Jeff Ling saying in his interview – part of the cover story for the September issue of NME Australia (which you can order here) – that by the end of recording for ‘Darker Still’, it was “incredibly mentally draining” to be in the band. 

As revealed by frontman Winston McCall, the band came close to breaking up, with discussions among them being about “every single member not wanting to be in the band anymore”.

So led Parkway to engaging in group therapy sessions, where, as McCall told NME, they were “laying it all out on the table to see how far back it all goes, all the way to your childhood and who you are as a person. We had a session, a couple of weeks ago, that literally changed my perspective on life. 

“It answered questions about myself that I’ve had my entire life – and when you have something like that finally click, it changes everything. It’s like pulling the blinders off, or erasing the question mark from a sentence. And that was missing from our entire existence of being in Parkway Drive… And it’s been an intense existence.”

In a roundup of outtakes from NME’s interviews with Parkway, McCall, Ling and drummer Ben Gordon opened up about the grim, real-world themes explored on ‘Darker Still’, the band’s plans for their own label, Parkway Records, and how Stranger Things helped to reignite a mainstream love for metal.

‘Darker Still’ was released last month via Parkway Records. In addition to its seven-minute title track, the album was supported by the singles ‘Glitch’ and ‘The Greatest Fear’. NME highlighted ‘Darker Still’ in its round-up of September’s best Australian releases, calling it “an authentically brutal record, mining from the darkest corners of Parkway’s collective psyche over a particularly rough two years”.

Earlier this year, Parkway appeared at the forefront of Fox League’s promotional campaign for the 2022 NRL Finals.