Byron Bay metal juggernauts Parkway Drive have announced that their long-awaited seventh full-length album Darker Still will be released on September 9th via Parkway Records. The announcement of Darker Still is accompanied by a new single The Greatest Fear which you can watch below.

Our second taste of Darker Still following the gargantuan Glitch, The Greatest Fear finds Parkway Drive taking a turn for the epic turning in a five-minute stomper.  Vocalist Winston McCall shares an explanation of The Greatest Fear.

"The greatest fear, the one we all share; this song is about the unifying force we all must face —death. The goal was to create a song that saw death not as something that separates, but something that connects us all on our paths. Musically, we wanted to create a song that did this concept justice. It's heavy, it's epic and when it stomps it leaves an impact."

McCall believes that Darker Still is the album that Parkway Drive have taken a 20 year journey to make.

"When Parkway originally started out, we all were trying to push ourselves to do more than we possibly could. What you hear on Darker Still is the final fulfillment of our ability to learn and grow catching up with the imagination that we have always had."

Guitarist Jeff Ling seems equally chuffed on what they've managed to achieve on Darker Still. 

"I'm really proud of what we have achieved together, and feel that as musicians, we have really ascended to new realms of class and ability."

while Darker Still remains irrefutably Parkway Drive, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal's greats — Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N' Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. The band notes that the album explores the concept of the "dark night of the soul" which is "the idea of reaching a point in your life where you are faced with a reckoning of your structure of beliefs, your sense of self and your place in the world, to a point where it's irreconcilable with the way that you are as a person," as McCall describes. 

Darker Still unfurls like the great rock concept albums, from Pink Floyd to, most comparably, Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, its 11 tracks taking in ruminations on society’s fear of death, isolation and a loss of humanity in its journey to redemptive enlightenment. 

Listen to Parkway Drive now.