“People kept telling us, ‘Don’t f**king do it. They’ll crucify you.’”: The songwriting risk that launched Parkway Drive into metal’s mainstream
Parkway Drive have long been metalcore heroes, but the release of 2015’s Ire saw the Byron Bay five-piece take their ferocious brand of metal to a more arena-ready format, and it was its third track, Vice Grip, that spearheaded the move.
But as frontman Winston McCall notes in a new interview with Metal Hammer, the band knew writing that song ran the risk of alienating their fanbase.
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Describing the track as “literally the biggest turning point in the band’s existence,” McCall remembers Vice Grip as “the first thing we started writing after we finished [2012’s] Atlas.
“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, ‘Okay, 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.’”
Those close to the band urged them to stay in their well-trodden metalcore lane, so to speak. “People kept telling us, ‘Don’t fucking do it. They’ll crucify you.’ But McCall says the band were hellbent on pushing “further in a different direction”.
“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,” he says.
As the story goes, guitarist Jeff Ling sent McCall and drummer Ben Gordon a message: “Don’t freak out, but I’ve done work on that song, and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard from us.’”
“I remember sending a message to Ben after, saying: ‘Dude, I can’t get that riff out of my brain!’”
Watch the insane video for Vice Grip, which sees the band skydiving from 10,000 feet up, below:
The post “People kept telling us, ‘Don’t f**king do it. They’ll crucify you.’”: The songwriting risk that launched Parkway Drive into metal’s mainstream appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
