Walkways - A Reminder
On August 28, 2026, "A Reminder", the third studio album by "Walkways", was released.
Seven years is an eternity in modern music industry terms, but for Tel Aviv alternative metal quintet "Walkways", the years since the release of their critically acclaimed second album Bleed Out Heal Out in 2019 have been a melting pot of coming of age, inner struggles, world upheavals and an uncompromising search for naked artistic truth. The band, formed by guitarist Yoni Maner, bassist Avichai Levy and drummer Priel Horesh, and which solidified its spectacular identity with the addition of charismatic vocalist Ran Yerushalmi and guitarist Bar Caspi for their 2013 debut album Safe in Sound, has never been content to play metal for the sake of it. 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 has distinguished itself as a band that uses crushing riffs as a tool for open-heart surgery.
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 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.
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 Maner 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 Avichai Levy on bass and Priel Horesh on drums. Above all of this, Ran Yerushalmi's voice with its enormous range 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 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 visual of two hands reaching out to each other in a pouring rain of mud and darkness, 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.
At the heart of the work stands the monumental title track, "A Reminder", which also opens the album. Five minutes and twenty-two seconds 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 and uplifting chorus. 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, in a work dedicated in loving and painful memory to Dan Kamahji and Moshe Yom Tov.
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 energetic highlights of the album and the band's performances.
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 speaker 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.
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, who hailed it as the band's most complete, courageous, and moving album. "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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