Darker Still Review

Band	Parkway Drive
Album	Darker Still
Type	Album (Studio full-length)
Released	September 9, 2022
Labels	Epitaph
Ranked	#161 for 2022 , #8,990 all-time

Reviewer :  Cosmicism         Rating :  60 / 100

Bad, embarrassing, & immature. I gave this a try expecting I would hate it. Actually I only hate about 45% of it and liked about 10%.

There are some heavy metal solos that are quite wonderful. A couple of songs get into a nice groove. Winston's voice sometimes I find awful on stylistic grounds, but sometimes it's kinda good.

The bad aspects totally overwhelm the album though. There is tough-guy macho crap on most songs. Don't let anyone walk in the room if you're listening to this. The lyrics are often bad, and repeating the same line brainlessly. The ballad near the middle of the album is loose with no tension, and it's clear the band can't conceive of how to find the right timing to make the melody interesting. This ballad is so bad that the heavy metal solo on it is boring & pointless. Don't throw a solo into a dumpster fire of a song; it just makes it burn longer.

I wished this album would've been shorter. The brief moments of good music were nowhere near good enough to raise it to so-so territory. It's time for us to criticize the whole metalcore industry for conceiving of a genre that is defined by objectively bad songwriting and cringeworthy artistic values.