How Parkway Drive Unleashed Hell on Earth for Its 20th Anniversary Tour

For a brief, fleeting moment, Parkway Drive transformed the stage into Hell on Earth, and Sam Tozer was the man responsible for opening the gates.

A lone spotlight glides across a sea of black t-shirts and tattoos. With a crackle of electricity, the atmosphere rises, swelling with the anticipation of something unknown. All eyes fixate on the illuminated glow that sweeps through the arena, passing over shapes of every size and inclination, before settling on the northern entrance, where a mammoth marching flag lies dormant. For the 13,000 fans in attendance, this is the moment they’ve been waiting for.

Suddenly, there’s movement. Like a boxer making his way to the ring, five figures weave through a maze of bodies towards a hollowed-out stage, where they will wage war for the next three hours. For Parkway Drive, Australia’s preeminent metal act, this moment—20 years in the making—almost didn’t happen.

Just a few short years ago, the band looked on the brink, burned out from years of relentless touring, an aggressive workload and a demanding production schedule. The announcement of a brief hiatus sent shockwaves through the heavy music community and while the band was able to patch things up and return to the road, the battle scars that remained cast a lingering question mark over Parkway Drive’s 20th Anniversary celebrations. From the moment the opening chord of Carrion, the lead track from the band’s 2007 smash hit album Horizons, rang out, any shred of doubt disappeared.

A sonic explosion pierced through the arena speakers, sending a thunderous wall of sound from the floating stage in the centre of the arena outwards towards the sold-out crowd. With every booming kick of Ben Gordon’s bass drum, the mass of bodies pulsated with chaotic energy, illuminated only by glowing yellow strobes and the fury and flames of a world-class pyrotechnical show. For a brief, fleeting moment, the Brisbane Entertainment Centre transformed into Hell on Earth, and Sam Tozer was the man responsible for opening the gates.

As head of experimental studio Vision Factory, the British show designer had previously overseen productions for international acts like Chase & Status, Sam Fender, and Yungblud, even managing show duties for the 2024 Saudi Arabian F1. Still, nothing could have prepared him for what Parkway Drive had in store.

“The intensity…Even though there are some really dynamic moments in the show and there are some quiet moments and engagement moments, 90 per cent of the show is very in-your-face sonically,” he explains. “(The challenge) was trying to match that visually without being overkill. You can’t just have a strobe in your face for the whole two hours. We tried to choreograph it so it looks different to a normal metal show.”

Tozer’s point is valid—this isn’t just another tour. Kicking off in Brisbane earlier this month, the massive 20th-anniversary expedition celebrated the Byron Bay metalcore act’s journey from basement-dwellers to global heavyweights in modern heavy music. A tour two decades in the making, the series of dates demanded something more ambitious than the traditional metal concert setup, a fact that wasn’t lost on Tozer.

Vision Factory factory set to work on creating a dynamic, theatrical experience that matched Parkway Drive’s incredible stage presence. The result is a multi-sensory journey that takes fans inside the band’s remarkable world of fire and brimstone. Channelling a post-apocalyptic dystopia, Tozer and Vision Factory’s design sets the tone for an all-out assault on the traditional live music experience. Stages twist and turn, environments shift and swell, while McCall and Co. tear through 20 years of brutal performance art at breakneck speed. At the centre of it all lies the show’s true pièce de résistance; a 50-foot-high steel bridge that appears pulled from another world, now abandoned and decayed.

“It was a very big collaborative process between myself, my team and Parkway just to start with,” Tozer explains. “They wanted a physical world that was apocalyptic; that was the brief, but we took it up a few notches. We came up with this monolithic sort of structure that had these physical elements that were very in your face. The main point was they wanted something physical and not screen-driven.”

“There’s obviously a legacy there; the guys have been around for 20 years. We’ve all seen the spinning drum kit and the flames, but Parkway, the band, are very much used to having a lot of physical effects on stage so they sort of help drive that with me, which is great.”

For Tozer, whose past credits have largely focused on electronic music festivals and large-scale set design, the shift into metal music represented uncharted territory, but the goals remained the same. Namely, to put on a show that shattered expectations and kept fans entertained. The latter, he reveals, is the challenge of the modern-day entertainer.

“I wanted the show to be very dynamic and theatre based, so there’s a lot of gags, there’s a lot of fun moments in the show, rain, smoke, fire obviously. So being able to orchestrate all those elements together was obviously a difficult task,” he explained. “The challenge that we find in today’s world is people are obsessed with looking at screens and iPhones and stuff. The question was ‘How can we keep the show energetic and engaging for the full two hours and 15 minutes that the show is without people expecting to look at, I don’t know, a screen?’. We needed to make sure the show had a journey or a story that people could engage with from start to finish.”

“They wanted to show the world that they are an arena-level artist and to do that, sometimes you need something bigger than a six-foot Winston screaming.”

Across the full two-hour show, Parkway Drive performs in a floating and ever-expanding environment that mirrors the band’s natural evolution. Incorporating the four elements of fire, wind, water, and earth, the display follows a dynamic arc that exists almost as a show within a show. Vision Factory’s Liam Griffiths even created a monochromatic lighting design that further enhanced the natural elements at play.

At different points during the performance, the mammoth bridge catches fire, and rain hails onto the band, transforming the performance into a visceral experience. The larger scale obviously presented larger challenges, with Tozer revealing that the production crew spent eight days in a facility in Sydney testing the physical elements for safety and viability.

“We built the show away from audience members so that we could rehearse and test those ideas, those concepts out. But there’s definitely a fear factor there,” he says. “Parkway is renowned for fire in a show, but stepping up to a flaming spider bridge, flaming thing, and adding water and adding smoke and wind onto the stage is obviously a new idea for them and we had to say, ‘Trust us, please’. Once it all came together in the studio, they saw that they didn’t need to rely just on fire; they could have other moments in the show.”

With the Australian leg of Parkway Drive’s 20th-anniversary tour now complete, attention turns to the band’s upcoming U.S. and U.K. dates. The metal act confirmed they are taking the show on the road with a European tour in October and November 2025. The dates will showcase the ambitious new set design and production, promising to deliver, as it did in Australia, g an unforgettable and immersive live experience like never before. For anyone looking to attend a Parkway gig in the future, Tozer has one small piece of advice.

“No videos. Just watch it.”