PARKWAY DRIVE TRIVIA
Trivia
The band's site announced premiere screenings of Parkway Drive: HOME, the film built around the Sydney Opera House concert, in six cities in November 2026, the last of them in Tokyo: Cinemart Shinjuku on 25 November. The list began with Sydney's State Theatre on 10 November, followed by Los Angeles, New York, London and Berlin, with Tokyo last. The synopsis describes a band that has spent two decades headlining festivals and arenas coming home to reimagine its music with a full symphony orchestra for one night, creative tensions and self-doubt included. The shoot, the Ballina Times reports, closed Sydney Harbour and had Winston McCall rappel from a helicopter onto the sails of the Opera House; McCall says the film combines the concert with other material from the band's world.
Horizons, in 2007, took the band back to Zing Studios in Massachusetts and to Adam Dutkiewicz. Resist Records says it entered the ARIA albums chart at No. 6 and went to No. 1 on both the Australian artist chart and the independent chart, and Billboard counts it as the band's first top-ten album at home, adding that it reached No. 27 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart. It was also the album that, according to Guitar World, Epitaph Records picked up for release in the United States.
Atlas was recorded in Los Angeles with producer Matt Hyde, whose credits include Slayer and Hatebreed. When Resist Records announced the album on 12 September 2012, alongside a new video for "Dark Days", the first song released from it, the pre-order on offer was a limited bundle pairing the CD with a Parkway Drive beach towel. Guitar World notes that Atlas debuted at No. 32 on the Billboard album chart.
"Vice Grip", the first single from Ire, was such a departure that the band argued over whether to lead with it at all, Luke Kilpatrick has said. In the past they would not have had the nerve, but it fitted the approach of the whole album, so out it went, and it became the biggest song in their set. Its video, which Resist Records announced in June 2015, has the members themselves jumping out of aeroplanes. Rolling Stone Australia reports that the song even inspired a petition, signed by 3,600 people, to make it Australia's new national anthem.
On the Australian albums chart, Parkway Drive went from the top 40 to a run of No. 1s. Resist Records says Killing with a Smile (2005) spent time in the ARIA top 40 and that Horizons (2007) entered at No. 6; Billboard calls Horizons the band's first top-ten album at home and Ire (2015) the first of three consecutive records to top the Australian chart. Darker Still (2022) entered ARIA's albums chart for the week of 19 September 2022 at No. 1, which the band's own site describes as their third No. 1 in a row. The same page says six of their seven studio albums have gone gold in Australia.
In the United States, Guitar World reports, Deep Blue entered the Billboard album chart at No. 39 in 2010 and Atlas at No. 32 in 2012. Billboard adds that Deep Blue began a run of four records in a row inside the top 40 of the Billboard 200, that Ire peaked there at No. 29 in 2015, and that Ire was the band's first release to top the Top Hard Rock Albums chart. For Darker Still (2022), the band's own site lists entries at No. 5 in the official German and Swiss albums charts, No. 7 in Austria and No. 11 in Belgium, along with No. 2 on the UK Rock & Metal chart and No. 4 on the US Current Hard Rock Music Album chart.
Parkway Drive have also documented themselves on film. Resist Records describes the 2009 release The DVD as a 70-minute documentary built on footage going back to the band's very first shows, following them from the beaches of the New South Wales North Coast to stages around the world, and says it was certified gold within a week of release. Home Is for the Heartless, shot in 42 countries on five continents, runs 75 minutes and is part travelogue, part close look at the band on stage and off. Ahead of its July 2012 release, Resist announced invitation-only cinema screenings in Byron Bay, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth for late May, with double passes drawn from among fans who pre-ordered. It shares its title with the Deep Blue song "Home Is for the Heartless".
Parkway Drive have marked the milestones of their first two albums on stage. On 6 October 2017, the day Resist Records marked as ten years since Horizons came out, the band announced A Decade of Horizons, an Australian tour for January 2018 with a special anniversary set built around the album and Sydney's Polaris on every date; the opening show, at Unify Gathering on 12 January, was already sold out. In June 2026 came Killing Horizons, announced as two-night stands in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in August, with Killing with a Smile played in full on the first night and Horizons on the second, plus other favourites on both. Winston McCall said the idea grew out of the Killing with a Smile medley they had put together for their previous tour, and that some of the songs had not been played live in over a decade, while some had never been played at all.
The band took its name from a street: Parkway Drive was the road where they had their first rehearsal space. As Guitar World tells it, the group had been called Think Straight and switched to the new name early in 2003. The local Ballina Times adds that the street is in Ewingsdale and that the name was picked by a bunch of Byron Bay High School teenagers. Guitarist Jeff Ling has said that simply being themselves, surf shorts and all, set them apart from bands with brutal names and a dress code, and that kids could perhaps relate to that.
The sign on the street that gave the band its name has been stolen so many times that, according to the Ballina Times, Byron Shire Council finally resorted to painting the name straight onto the road. That brought its own trouble, Winston McCall says: people now lie down on the road to have their photo taken. Rolling Stone Australia put the tug-of-war between fans and council at twelve years, with the sign replaced about six times a year on average. The Byron street is not the only one. In 2014 Music Feeds, citing the Gold Coast Bulletin, reported that a street of the same name in Advancetown on the Gold Coast kept losing its sign as well, to thieves thought to be devoted fans of the band, and that the council had for a while renamed the road Parkway Street before going back to the original name.
Before Parkway Drive there was Think Straight, a band Winston McCall and Ben Gordon had started. In Guitar World's account, Gordon invited Luke Kilpatrick in once Kilpatrick's own hardcore band had broken up, and McCall was not keen at first: Kilpatrick, he admits, had been one of the cool kids and used to make fun of him for living about ten minutes out of town and for not being part of the popular surfing crowd. Once that was behind them, the two decided they needed a better player and songwriter, and Gordon remembered the lead guitarist who used to live next door, two years older than him: Jeff Ling. Unknown to them, Ling had already been in the crowd at their local shows. He had never meant to join a band, tried it anyway and found he loved it. When the band took its new name in early 2003, everyone except Ling was in his mid-teens. The band's own site traces its start to a group of friends gathering in their parents' basements and backyards in 2003, and the Ballina Times names the basement of Gordon's family home.
The first gig came in early 2003 at the Byron Bay Youth Centre. Jeff Ling, who had never played in front of anyone, remembers being terrified, standing on stage in board shorts with his socks pulled up and not thinking they played well. Michael Crafter, singer of I Killed the Prom Queen, saw it differently. He happened to be in town from Adelaide that night to visit his girlfriend, went along to the show and, according to Guitar World, asked Parkway Drive to make a split record with his band, which came out in 2003. The two bands played shows around Australia, and when Parkway got home, Prom Queen's label, Resist Records, offered them a deal for Australia; the Don't Close Your Eyes EP followed in 2004.
For their debut album, Killing with a Smile, Parkway Drive tried something that Guitar World says none of their countrymen had done. They sent their EP to Killswitch Engage guitarist and producer Adam Dutkiewicz and asked whether he would produce the record. He agreed, so the band flew to Western Massachusetts and made the album at Zing Studios, keeping the sessions to a mere two weeks to hold down costs and flying straight home afterwards. Resist Records' biography of the band notes that the album spent time in the ARIA top 40.
Killing with a Smile went down well in Australia, but no label would put it out in Europe or the United States, so the members borrowed money from their parents and flew to Europe anyway. Guitar World describes them booking their own shows, opening for local bands when they were lucky, playing to a handful of people with their arms folded, then driving for hours in a rented van to somewhere even more remote. To save on hotels they pulled over when they were tired and slept outside. Luke Kilpatrick could not see the point of paying 100 dollars a night when it was beautiful out and everyone had a sleeping bag, and he remembers waking up one morning in England on a farm surrounded by cow dung. Jeff Ling adds that mosquitoes biting your face all night, and sprinklers coming on in people's yards, were less fun. Rolling Stone Australia remembers them the same way: self-managed, and willing to sleep under vans or on tarps in freezing weather for the sake of touring.
Their first tour of the United States ran on the same shoestring, and it did not always go smoothly. Sleeping in the van on residential streets, Luke Kilpatrick recalls, sometimes alarmed the locals, who saw a strange van parked near their houses, took the band for terrorists and called the police; Guitar World adds that they were now and then woken up and moved on like vagrants. It was The Warriors who first brought them to America, Winston McCall said in 2011: they got the band touring in the States, and the gear Parkway Drive used every night on that tour still belonged to The Warriors, who lent them everything whenever they came over. By the end of the Deep Blue touring cycle, according to Guitar World, the band were finally making enough money to travel by bus.
Deep Blue (2010) carries two guests who meant a great deal to the band. Brett Gurewitz, who owns Epitaph, their American label, and plays guitar in Bad Religion, sang backing vocals on "Home Is for the Heartless". Bad Religion had been Winston McCall's favourite band since he was about twelve, he said in 2011, and three of his bandmates felt the same; when the song turned up a part that did not sound like Parkway Drive, they asked Gurewitz on the off chance, and he threw himself into it. Marshall Lichtenwaldt, singer of The Warriors, the band that first took them to America, sang on "Hollow" in a straight swap, with McCall singing a track on The Warriors' next record in return. The producer was Joe Barresi, whose credits include Bad Religion. Epitaph, Guitar World notes, had picked the band up in the United States with Horizons, which made Parkway Drive the only metalcore act on its roster at the time.
For Ire, the band gave the producer's job to the man who mixed their live sound. Guitar World lists hiring their virtually unknown front-of-house engineer to produce the album among the odd-looking decisions that kept paying off for Parkway Drive. Noise11 reported that Reverence (2018) was produced once again by George Hadjichristou, the band's sound engineer of many years, and JB Hi-Fi's product notes say it was recorded at All Buttons In Recording Studio in Ottawa.
Parkway Drive have won the ARIA Award for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album three times, for Deep Blue in 2010, Reverence in 2018 and Darker Still in 2023; Billboard counts the Darker Still win as their third in the category. In December 2020, Rolling Stone Australia's special issue on the 50 Greatest Australian Artists of All Time placed them at No. 32. Rather than have its own writers praise the chosen artists, the magazine asked people those artists had inspired to make the case for them, and Parkway Drive's entry was written by Emmy Mack of Redhook.
The film Viva the Underdogs was announced in November 2019 as a one-night cinema event: it was set to open in Australian cinemas on 22 January 2020, and Louder reported that UK and Irish cinemas would screen it the same night. It mixes more than a decade of the band's own behind-the-scenes footage with their tours and big festival appearances to tell a 15-year underdog story. Announcing it, Winston McCall said Parkway Drive were no overnight success and would never go viral, and called the film an honest look at what it takes to survive as underdogs.
Besides eleven live tracks from the band's headline set at Wacken Open Air in 2019, the Viva the Underdogs soundtrack has three studio recordings in German: "Würgegriff" ("Vice Grip"), "Die Leere" ("The Void") and "Schattenboxen" ("Shadow Boxing"), the last with the German rapper Casper. Winston McCall called it one of the most unusual projects the band had ever taken on. Reworking their songs in another language was a huge challenge, he said, and after so many years of support they wanted to do it with complete integrity, carrying the meaning and spirit of every song over into a language that was not their own. He described the German versions as a thank-you to the fans who had sung the originals with them.
In 2019 Parkway Drive headlined Wacken Open Air in Germany, and Rolling Stone Australia puts the crowd that watched them at 75,000. Eleven songs from that set, running from "Prey" to "Bottom Feeder", became the live part of the Viva the Underdogs soundtrack the following year, as Blabbermouth reported. Wall of Sound notes that the same year also saw them headline Good Things Festival.
On 9 June 2025 Parkway Drive played a one-off show at the Sydney Opera House with a full symphony orchestra. As Winston McCall described it to Rolling Stone Australia, the audience was seated and in black tie, the band played on grass, and the set list was turned around from what fans were used to; the idea was to do the exact opposite of what anyone expected. There was a single rehearsal with the orchestra, four hours before showtime, and the magazine reports that the night had sold out in under three minutes. Wall of Sound's review names Alec Roberts as conductor and describes a Welcome to Country by three Indigenous performers, Matthew Doyle among them, to open the evening, and an encore in which singer Jenna McDougall joined McCall for "A Deathless Song", the first time the two had performed together live. McCall calls it the loudest show the Opera House has ever had, and Music Feeds describes Parkway Drive as the first heavy band to play there with a full symphony orchestra.
Drummer Ben Gordon once found himself teaching Chris Hemsworth to play the drums. In "Brain Power", the opening episode of Hemsworth's follow-up docuseries Limitless: Live Better Now, the actor, who had never played, has two months to learn well enough to join Ed Sheeran on stage in front of 70,000 people. Gordon told Australia's Today show that the two had been friends for seven or eight years, since meeting through a mutual friend when Hemsworth moved to Byron, and that he was the obvious person to call as Hemsworth's only friend who drums for a living. He had meant to help out behind the scenes, but the lessons were filmed and ended up in the episode. Winston McCall says Hemsworth also came and played with the band, and that they had to be very honest with him about his lack of ability.
As Parkway Drive grew, playing at home became all but impossible. Their 2015 Australian tour for Ire included a show at Byron Bay High School on 3 October, and in February 2026 Winston McCall told the Ballina Times that it had been their last gig in the area: after that the band got too big for any venue in town. The same article reported that Bluesfest's festival director, Peter Noble, whose son had also gone to Byron Bay High, had invited them to play on 2 April 2026, a chance to perform where they grew up for the first time in more than a decade. Nobody sees the word "blues" and thinks of Parkway Drive, McCall admitted, but the band represents the roots of Byron too, and they had never even got to play Splendour.
"Sacred", released in May 2025, was Parkway Drive's first new music in three years and their first release since Darker Still (2022). In a statement quoted by Billboard, Winston McCall described its mission as an "anthemic wrecking ball" of positive energy, aimed at a world that keeps framing people's lives in negativity and hopelessness and fixing them on whatever they lack, hate or blame. It came out a few weeks before the Sydney Opera House concert, where, Wall of Sound reports, it was given the full orchestral treatment.
Every member of Parkway Drive grew up in Byron Bay. In Guitar World's telling, the town of about 5,000 people had no music scene and not one rock radio station through the 1980s and 1990s, and the band first heard metal as the background music on the surf videos they watched as kids. Luke Kilpatrick describes them as active people who surf every day: grow up by the beach, he says, and you always want to be doing something physical. The magazine also counts deliberately booking shows in prime surf spots among the band's unlikely decisions that paid off, and Resist Records' biography likewise begins their story on the beaches of the New South Wales North Coast.
Of the five members of Parkway Drive, only bassist Jia O'Connor was not there at the start, as Guitar World pointed out in 2016 while introducing them by their nicknames: guitarist Luke "Pig" Kilpatrick, drummer Ben "Gaz" Gordon and O'Connor himself, "Pie". Ten years on, the band's own site names the same five: frontman Winston McCall, guitarists Jeff Ling and Kilpatrick, bassist O'Connor and drummer Gordon. Looking back on the Sydney Opera House show in 2025, McCall was still calling his drummer Gaz.