Walkways - A Reminder
Updated: 4 days ago
On August 28, 2026, "A Reminder", the third studio album by "Walkways", was released.
Seven years is an eternity in modern music industry terms, especially for an Israeli band living in a reality shaped by frequent extreme fluctuations. For "Walkways", the years since the release of their second and, we have to say, insane album "Bleed Out Heal Out" in 2019 have been a melting pot of coming of age, inner struggles, upheavals and an uncompromising search for naked artistic truth. The band, which began its independent journey back in 2006 as the founding duo of vocalist Ran Yerushalmi and guitarist Bar Caspi, and solidified its permanent lineup with the addition of guitarist Yoni Menner, bassist Avihai Levy and drummer Priel Horesh ahead of the acclaimed 2013 debut album Safe in Sound, has never settled for playing metal for the sake of heaviness alone. From the very beginning, through huge performances at major European festivals such as Wacken Open Air and joint tours with bands such as "In Flames", "Jinjer", "Memphis May Fire" and "Avenged Sevenfold", the Israeli group marked itself as the spearhead of the Israeli metal scene, taking everything it has in its gut and channeling it with full force into its songs.
But while "Bleed Out Heal Out" documented the moment when the wound bleeds out in full force under the cover of a polished international production by Nuclear Blast, the third album, "A Reminder"," released under the prestigious Australian label Wild Thing Records, captures the band members in a much more sober, exposed, and complex place. The years leading up to the album's release confronted Ran Yerushalmi and his bandmates with a chaotic personal and collective reality, in which questions of mental health, addiction to pain, loss, broken relationships, and the need to survive in a world that has lost its moral compass turned from lines in a songbook into life itself. From this black hole was born the refined understanding that gives the album its name and its philosophical backbone, the notion that total darkness (Pitch Black) is an opportunity for the smallest glimmer of light, and that every scar and wound are not a mark of disgrace but a constant reminder of the need to heal, repair, and grow. Under the slogan accompanying the album, "Every wound is a reminder to heal", the band distills processes of healing, mental rehabilitation, and coping with inner demons into 13 exposed tracks.
Musically and production-wise, "A Reminder" presents "Walkways" at the peak of their creative maturity. Here, the band perfects the hybrid language that has become their hallmark, an explosive and seamless combination of the melodic emotionality of bands like "Deftones" and "Incubus", the tight and precise polyrhythmic groove of modern progressive metal, and the raw fury of nu-metal like "Korn" and contemporary metalcore. The guitar work of Yoni Menner and Bar Caspi moves with masterful freedom between atmospheric arpeggios wrapped in reverb and dignified attacks and aggressive riffs that saw through the air, while leaning on the formidable and telepathic rhythm section of Avihai Levy on bass and Priel Horesh on drums. Above all of this, the enormous-ranged voice of Ran (in our opinion, the Israeli Corey Taylor) soars in one of the most impressive vocal displays ever heard in Israeli metal, as he skips in a split second from intimate and fragile whispers that sound close to the listener's ear, to sky-high stadium chants, to growls, guttural roars, and heart-rending screams. The band members describe their music as a "warm hug from a monster". Heavy, pounding and powerful music that simultaneously offers comfort and reminds us that human pain is universal, whether its source is war, poverty, or a personal mental struggle.
The first statement of intent from this journey was revealed in the moving and powerful single "All For You", a song that immediately puts the album's extreme duality center stage. Against a mesmerizing black-and-white video clip, Yerushalmi turns the old cliché of romantic sacrifice on its head. Instead of promising to die for the person he loves in a world that is raised on the concept of kill or be killed, he chooses the much harder and braver promise, to live for him, build an inner alliance and re-emerge from the ruins. The rhythmic and compressed verses explode into a huge melodic chorus where Yerushalmi's clean and tormented voice is carried on a wide wall of guitars, before the song dives into an aggressive rhythmic bridge and closes with a chilling whisper of exposed piano that leaves the listener shivering.
If "All For You" reaches out with a compassionate hand, the track "A Fuck You, A Thank You" turns its fist directly inward, facing the mirror. This is one of the most psychological and brutal pieces on the album, a ruthless reckoning monologue of a man with his own past self and the personal fracture that shaped him. The song opens with a claustrophobic and menacing atmosphere that erupts with a chilling battle cry about the splitting of personality and soul, and is led by a heavy and piercing groove from Maner, Caspi and Levy. In the chorus, the band manages to ingeniously combine pure rage with sober gratitude, as Yerushalmi spits a juicy curse and in the same breath says sincere thanks for everything that went wrong in his life, every betrayal and every fall that forced him to shed his indulgence and vanity and become the person he is today. The song's ending, with its chilling spoken monologue set to a fading tribal drumming, is a moment of brilliant dark metal theater, one of the band's most powerful hallmarks.
At the heart of the work stands the monumental title track (to put it mildly), "A Reminder", which also opens the album. Five minutes that distill the philosophy of the entire album into an atmospheric and evolving masterpiece. The song opens with an almost religious whisper from the darkness and clean, dreamy and contemplative guitar playing, reminiscent of the emotional high points of "Architects" and "Deftones". With the patience of artists confident in their own strength, the members of "Walkways" build the tension layer by layer, with Yerushalmi's voice caressing the lyrics about the pain that is growth and the stains that make us unique, until the song erupts in a broad, soul-lifting chorus laden with layers and string arrangements. In the fourth minute, when the white light turns to bright red, the band releases all inhibitions into a devastating climax of crushing riffs, Horesh's tremendous drumming, and cathartic cries that tear the sky apart.
The social, angry and piercing side of the album reaches its aggressive climax in a pair of tracks that demonstrate the technical and rhythmic power of the quintet. First with "A Virus. Prove Me Wrong", a short, fast and dense outburst of rage in which the band combines rough nu-metal influences with razor-sharp riffs and uncompromising screams against the culture of silencing and hypocrisy. Immediately following it is "A Devil's Mist (Fire)", a modern, rhythmic and fiery metal anthem that opens with a dizzying guitar riff and a sweeping drum beat. The song's sharp lyrics sharply criticize a world addicted to superficial beauty, the illusions of makeup and fake halos while the reality around is on fire. The combination of the anthemic choir singing in the chorus and the heavy breakdown and the resonant sentence that concludes the song, according to which this song will change nothing if the listener himself does not change, makes it one of the energy highlights of the album.
In the face of these storms, "Walkways" presents one of the most poetic, mature and moving moments in its history in the song "A Kiss On The Forehead". It is a mesmerizing piece that opens with a clean acoustic and electric guitar riff alongside Horesh's delicate and precise drumming, and paints an intimate picture of inner peace on the riverbank. Instead of fighting the inner demons with endless violence, the hero chooses to bring all his demons inside with a smile and a kiss on the forehead, and find peace with both his halos and his horns, both with the flowers and the thorns. The dynamic transition between the soft verses and the huge chorus and the floating melodic solo in the second part of the song demonstrates how much the band has evolved in its compositional and arranging abilities.
Featuring three atmospheric transition tracks that weave the project together into one of the band's most cohesive and flawless albums, the record closed with the moving "A Smile (Soul Deep)", the first song Ran Yerushalmi ever wrote, beautifully reworked by all the band members for the album.
One of the most prominent traits characterizing most Israeli bands is the ability and talent (sometimes for lack of other options) to do everything themselves. The entire album was written and produced together by all the band members, the lyrics were written by Yerushalmi, with Caspi also sharing in the writing on "A Virus. Prove Me Wrong" and "Again & Again & Again". The mixing was done by Priel, the mastering by Australian Forrester Savell, and they received recording assistance from Israeli Omer Sheer.
By the way, those who purchased the album in its CD version (like your humble servants) were rewarded with recipes: Strawberry & Apple Banana Smoothie, Natural Headache Remedy and Vegan Banana Cake - look for them on the CD sleeve. We are still trying to figure out their meaning...
Upon its release in August 2026 and the festive launch show in Tel Aviv held on November 4th, "A Reminder" was warmly embraced by the local metal community and especially by the band's fans. From our perspective, this is the band's most complete, mature, courageous and moving album to date. "Walkways" proved with "A Reminder" that true power in metal is not measured solely in decibels of distortion, but in the courage to look the pain in the whites of the eyes, embrace the fragments, and turn them into healing art.
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