What have you done to cultivate creative spontaneity in an environment of such great familiarity? It's your seventh album over the course of being together for nearly 20 years. What we tried to accomplish, the types of songs we tried to write and put onto an album and the scope of the entire thing is much broader than anything we've done before. So how far do you want to go with it? And for us it was like, 'Well, if you're not gonna have another shot at this, you may as well go as far as possible in terms of sonic changes and everything you wanna commit to.' So it leads itself to being a very varied album in terms of the sonic pallet. This could be the last thing you ever do. But when we started writing, we approached it with a no holds barred. Now it turns out everything's up and rolling again. So in terms of us writing, we're like, 'Well, if we're only gonna write one more album, what do you want to actually write?' Basically the entire world kind of thought this could be it, like this literally could be it for the entire world. I'm sure every single band kind of says that every time they do an album, but for us, we started writing this during year one of COVID craziness, and when all that was going on, basically we had the entire music industry shut down. (Laughs) where do I start on this one? Basically this album pushes the boundaries of what we've done as a band and what we can do as a band further than anything we've done previously. Winston, what's different about this album in terms of challenging yourselves with greater creative expectations?

We're here to celebrate the release of the new Parkway Drive record Darker Still, which is out now. That led to a cancelled tour earlier this year, and McCall speaks to how they've adapted in the time since to hopefully make their future a healthier one. The pandemic also had another effect on the group, forcing them to take a closer look at how they communicated with one another and realizing a change had to be made.

It goes dark it goes darker still song