Reverence by Parkway Drive

Reverence, Parkway Drive's sixth studio album, was released on 4 May 2018 through Resist and Epitaph, and it's the Byron Bay metalcore band going for something grander and more classic. With George Hadji-Christou producing, Winston McCall leans hard into clean singing, Jeff Ling's riffs swing wide and melodic alongside Luke Kilpatrick, and Ben Gordon and Jia O'Connor keep the engine room thundering. Critics heard it as a turn toward a more accessible heavy metal sound, and it is, though it hasn't lost its teeth.

The subjects are heavy ones, religion and death, and the cover spells it out with a restored version of Peter Paul Rubens' painting The Fall of the Damned. "The Void" is the fist-pumper of the bunch. It topped the ARIA Albums Chart and won the 2018 ARIA Award for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album, the band's second after Deep Blue.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.