heavy-metal-darkness: Today Is The Day | Never Give In

Release Date: October 3, 2025

Format: LP/CD/Digital

Genre: Avant Metal, Psychedelic Metal, Noise Rock

Country: USA

Few names in extreme music have walked through fire the way Today Is The Day has. Led by the ever-volatile Steve Austin since the early 1990s, the band became a singular force in the underground, twisting metal, noise, and chaos into something personal and brutally honest. Across decades and countless lineups, Austin turned trauma and confrontation into sound. From “Willpower” and “Temple Of The Morning Star” to “No Good To Anyone”, his work has always been an unfiltered reflection of inner war. “Never Give In” continues that lineage, scarred, angry, visionary, and deeply human.

Born out of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the pandemic years, “Never Give In” is steeped in disillusionment and resistance. Austin doesn’t romanticize struggle; he documents it, microphone in one hand, gasoline can in the other. The album opens in full combat stance with “Divide And Conquer,” a track that lunges forward with jagged riffs and a barked warning. From there, it descends into a feverish cycle of paranoia, frustration, and catharsis. Titles like “Intentional Psychological Warfare” and “Secret Police” speak plainly for themselves.

The production is raw and unforgiving, the way Today Is The Day should sound. Guitars scrape like exposed nerves, bass churns underneath, and the drums come in waves of collapse and resurgence. Austin’s voice, alternately pleading and venomous, carries the manic energy of someone clawing through the static. When the brass enters on “Secret Police,” it doesn’t lighten the chaos, it deepens it, as if the whole thing’s collapsing under its own paranoia.

What gives “Never Give In” its pulse is not refinement but tension. It’s the sound of one man refusing to disappear, digging through modern decay to find meaning in the wreckage. The album’s psychedelic flourishes aren’t soothing, they’re warped, distorted windows into a collapsing mental state. Everything sounds haunted, as if transmitted from a bunker.

“Never Give In” is neither nostalgic nor neatly assembled. It’s a survival document, full of bile and self-reconstruction, too strange to be labeled hardcore, too aggressive to be called experimental rock. There’s an electricity in how unstable it feels, every track teeters on implosion, and that’s where its truth lies.

As the first half of a planned two-part concept, it doesn’t aim for resolution. It exists in the eye of the storm, alive, furious, and unfiltered. It’s not an easy listen but an honest one, an album made by someone who’s seen the machinery of despair and refused to let it grind him down. A harsh, restless statement from an artist who thrives on discomfort. “Never Give In” doesn’t seek comfort or perfection, it burns, screams, and drags itself forward, still standing after everything that tried to erase it.

Score: 6.5