Walkways – A Reminder (Album Review)
- Jaime Gómez
- Aug 26
- 3 min read
Record Label: Wild Thing Records
Release Date: 28 August 2026
The Riff Doctor’s Score:
RRRR
Making alternative metal in one of the world’s most troubled regions changes the meaning of music. It stops being mere entertainment and becomes a means of survival.
Tel Aviv quintet Walkways return with A Reminder, a 13-track album created during a deeply turbulent period in the Middle East. After the pandemic had already interrupted their progress, the events of October 2023 brought further uncertainty. Even as they released the album’s first single, ‘A Virus. Prove Me Wrong’, the band found themselves forced into shelters while missiles fell around them.
For Walkways, music has always offered an escape from the outside world—for both the band and anyone willing to join them. On A Reminder, that sanctuary is built from alternative metal, crushing grooves and explosive breakdowns, as the band confront trauma, relapse and the long process of mental reconstruction.
It is a raw and deeply human record, proving that musical heaviness can also provide the warmest refuge during the darkest of times.
The journey begins with ‘A Reminder’, the album’s five-minute title track. It is a masterful introduction that establishes the record’s atmosphere through fragile, introspective calm and heavy guitars, gradually building towards a soaring conclusion.
There is barely time to breathe before ‘A Fuck You, A Thank You’ erupts. Carrying the unmistakable scent of exquisite ’90s groove metal, it delivers an explicit burst of rage, driven by guttural vocals that feel remarkably refreshing within the band’s alternative sound.
‘A Devil’s Mist (Fire)’ keeps that anger burning. Its crushing rhythm and expertly handled vocal transitions give the chorus an immediate quality that should translate brilliantly when the band takes these songs on tour.
Next comes ‘A Virus. Prove Me Wrong’, written around the idea that a person can become a disease to themselves. Musically, the song descends into darker and more cathartic territory, featuring a wonderful interlude before its final breakdown tears everything apart.
‘Abiding Stress to Unstress’ acts as an introduction to ‘Again & Again & Again’, one of the heaviest tracks on the album. Here, Ran Yerushalmi demonstrates how naturally he moves between his different vocal registers, pouring rage into every one of the song’s shifting rhythms.
At the album’s midpoint, ‘Alone Together’ provides a welcome melodic pause before flowing naturally into ‘All for You’. Rhythmic and emotionally charged, its brilliant chorus feels destined to become a highlight of the band’s live shows.
The contrast arrives immediately with ‘A Kiss on the Forehead’, a dark and painful mid-tempo track wrapped in sharp, cutting riffs.
The penultimate track, ‘Another Relapse, Another Release’, combines samples, monologues and distant screams to recreate the disturbing sensation of a psychotic episode. It acts as a bridge into ‘A Smile (Soul Deep)’, a moving clean ballad that brings the album to an emotional close, tending to the wounds opened by the previous twelve tracks.
A Reminder is not comfortable background music. It is a shelter built from blood, sweat and distortion while the world burns outside.
This is a distinctive album that deserves to resonate across some of the world’s biggest festival stages. It carries an enormous amount of feeling at a time when that feels increasingly necessary, as we become ever more detached from the people and the world around us.
Jaime Gomez for The Riff Collective
Comments