Today Is the Day – Never Give In (Review)

This is the twelfth album from US metal band Today Is the Day.

Following on from 2014’s Animal Mother and 2020’s No Good to Anyone, comes the 47-minute Never Give In. Today Is the Day are fascinating, unique, and unpredictable, which makes every release something special. I’ve been looking forward to digging into this one, whatever it might hold.

Let’s get the genre tag word salad out of the way first; metal, hardcore, noise rock, black metal, sludge, psychedelic, experimental avant-garde, etc. – all have had their place in the Today Is the Day sound, and the end result always seems to be somehow greater than the sum of its parts too. So what of Never Give In? This time, things are different. To be fair, they always are, but here even more so. Some of he more extreme aspects of the music have been jettisoned in favour of a more restrained, slower burning approach.

Never Give In takes from various eras of Today Is the Day, discarding the unwanted and undesirable, and absorbing the rest into an amalgamation of negative emotion and idiosyncratic metallic catharsis. It’s brooding and considered, delivering music driven by emotive darkness into songs that emphasise the band’s noise rock, psychedelic, and avant-garde tendencies. It’s akin to a 90s experimental rock album, only one that’s come from another dimension and then dipped in caustic corrosion and saturated in hopelessness and despair. There is a dark grunge feel to it, warped and twisted. You can hear an Americana influence too, subsumed into the nightmarish whole, whether it wanted to be or not. With elements of doom and post-rock – in atmosphere and tone – this is a release that walks a path of its own in Today Is the Day’s discography. The stylistic ingredients used in Never Give In aren’t unprecedented in the band’s back catalogue, but this is the fullest expression of them so far in this form.

Like every Today Is the Day release, Never Give In is not what was expected. It’s a damaged trip into madness and pain, and yet ultimately is a record that’s very insidiously moreish. The songs don’t fully unveil themselves until you really get to know them. They’re textured, layered, intricate, and involved, yet have a raw honesty and heartfelt expression to them that’s compelling. Never Give In offers the listener a trip into worlds unseen, and it’s a journey you’d be foolish to refuse.