Few Australian bands have shaped modern heavy music quite like Parkway Drive. From Byron Bay metalcore upstarts to one of the genre’s defining global acts, the quintet have spent more than two decades relentlessly pushing their sound and live performances to ever greater heights. This August, however, they are looking back to where it all began.
The band have announced the Killing Horizons Australian tour, an intimate two-night residency in five cities celebrating two of the most important records in their catalogue. Night one will see Parkway Drive perform their breakthrough 2005 debut album Killing With A Smile in its entirety, while night two is devoted to its equally influential successor, 2007’s Horizons. Each performance will also feature a selection of the band’s biggest songs spanning their remarkable career.
For frontman Winston McCall, the idea emerged while revisiting Killing With A Smile during the band’s recent anniversary celebrations.
“This idea kicked off when we started working on the Killing With A Smile medley for our last tour,” McCall explains. “Revisiting Killing With A Smile with a fresh perspective lit a spark that remained after we finished up. Rather than let the spark die, we figured let’s create something special.”
The announcement follows a remarkable period for the band. After celebrating their twentieth anniversary with the biggest Australian tour of their career in 2024, a run that Backseat Mafia saw culminate in an enthralling performance before a captivated Sydney audience, Parkway Drive continued rewriting expectations in 2025 by performing with a full symphony orchestra at the Sydney Opera House before embarking on their largest-ever European arena tour. It was another reminder that the group have never been content to remain confined by the boundaries of metalcore.
This time, however, the focus is firmly on the records that launched Parkway Drive onto the world stage. Killing With A Smile and Horizons remain foundational releases for an entire generation of heavy music fans, helping redefine Australian metalcore and inspiring countless bands that followed.
With the tour taking place in venues far smaller than those Parkway Drive now routinely headline, Killing Horizons offers a rare opportunity to experience two landmark albums in an intimate setting. For longtime fans and newcomers alike, these performances promise to reconnect the band with the raw urgency that first established them as one of Australia’s greatest heavy music success stories.
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