Don't Close Your Eyes

Parkway Drive formed in Byron Bay in 2003 and released a split CD with I Killed the Prom Queen that same year. Don't Close Your Eyes followed on Resist Records in 2004: an eight-track CD, catalogue number RES033, which the label presented as the band's debut EP. It opens with a piece of about a minute whose title is printed only as "…", and it closes with the title track, "Don't Close Your Eyes". Stuart Nevin recorded and mixed the songs at Modern Music. When the EP was reissued in 2006, its credits gave the band as Winston McCall, Luke Kilpatrick, Jeff Ling, Ben Gordon and Jia O'Connor, and added that the bass on these recordings had been played by Brett Steegy. The second track, "Smoke 'Em If Ya Got 'Em", returned a year later on the band's first album, Killing with a Smile; that album was made at Zing Studios in Massachusetts, and the song was recorded afresh there with the rest of it. Resist reissued the EP in 2006, remastered and expanded to fourteen tracks: two songs from the split with I Killed the Prom Queen, three from the compilation What We Built and one from True Till Death Vol. 1. Brad Wann had recorded and mixed the added songs at Topcat Studios, and William Bowden remastered the whole programme. The label first announced the reissue for 7 August, then for 18 September, and manufacturing problems moved it once more, to 25 September. In 2023 Epitaph Records reissued the same fourteen tracks, putting the EP on vinyl for the first time, and that edition entered the ARIA albums chart at No. 32 in the week of 28 August 2023.