Parkway Drive – “Ire” [Album Review]

Ire, the new album from Australian metalcore bruisers Parkway Drive, is a massive release for the band. Ire needs to be an album which will drag them from underground heavyweights and into the mainstream metal big leagues where they truly belong.

Sadly, when a band is at the stage of their career that Parkway Drive are at, to make that jump usually means a fairly dramatic shift sound-wise, however, listening to Ire, it would appear that Parkway Drive have managed to get the balance between melodic metal anthems and outright bangers just right. For every “Fractures” where the band head down the more anthemic route, there is a “Dying To Believe” where they return to the more explosive metallic style fans of their previous work will be used to.

Regardless of popularity, there are so many tracks on Ire, like “Bottom Feeder” and “Sound Of Violence,” where Parkway Drive sound exactly like you’d want them to sound while benefiting hugely from a pristine production job. Thankfully for longtime fans of the band, tracks like these show that, even if Parkway Drive don’t get the jump into the big leagues through merit alone, they’re happy to smash their way to the top.

“Writings On The Wall” sees the group head down a more dramatic, experimental route and while it is something of a departure from the rest of the album, it offers up a bit of a breather sitting right in the middle of the metal mayhem. It’s one of many moments on Ire that showed, when needed, Parkway Drive can deliver big!

Track Listing:

01. Destroyer
02. Dying To Believe
03. Vice Grip
04. Crushed
05. Fractures
06. Writings On The Wall
07. Bottom Feeder
08. The Sound Of Violence
09. Vicious
10. Dedicated
11. A Deathless Song

Run Time: 48:19
Release Date: October 2, 2015

Check out the song “The Sound of Violence” here.