Review: Today Is The Day – Never Give In
Rightly or wrongly, few bands have as widely an agreed upon cut-off point in the minds of their fanbase as Today Is The Day. Sadness Will Prevail is a work of such unflinching darkness and scale that the follow-up, 2004’s Kiss The Pig—an album that trades in personal destruction for full-scale human nihility in the face of the Iraq war and the 21st century—was always going to be a sidestep. Despite exploring the edges of everything from doom metal to post-rock in the two decades following Sadness Will Prevail, none of the band’s records have managed to grip in the way an album like Willpower or In The Eyes Of God did, perhaps due to just how disparate in sound each album could be from one another.
Following a half-decade gap from 2020’s No Good To Anyone, an album of mixed reception, Never Give In is (according to Steve Austin) the first part of a forthcoming double album, and as such it’s hard to give a lasting analysis of. What defines it and what is absent from it might well be made clearer when heard as a whole, and whatever shortcomings you find might be lessened in the context of a double album. But I can only review what is given to us, and Never Give In is a bizarre album in its own right. Never Give In is explicitly a lockdown-era album, its writing rooted in isolation and bleakness. It’s a very different breed of melancholy from the kind that defined the earlier work of Steve Austin, which has led to an already fairly divisive album reception.
“Divide And Conquer” is a lower-key start to the record: flitting guitar triplets ground the panning, swirling mix of vocals and descending synth-lines. For as functionally remedial as its writing is, it’s surprisingly hard for me to get a grasp on. When most music gets described as disorientating, I feel it’s typically used on records of blistering speed or oppressive heaviness, and while I would describe Never Give In as both blistering and oppressive in its own ways, “Divide And Conquer” is very much its own thing: a mid-tempo, open chord track that you could imagine as an acoustic song in the vein of the acoustic version of Temple Of The Morning Star. Those panning, pained howls accent the main vocals greatly; it feels like you’re starting a descent down the first steps of Hell. My description sounds like it could be the start of a considered, disturbing album of similar quality, which is why it’s even more bizarre that “Divide And Conquer” is so anomalous in the track-listing.
“I Got Nothin'” incorporates the disparate synth elements of a band like Suicide with the punk blues of Rowland S. Howard. It’s a truly unusual song to me: the arpeggiated synth-line that threatens to fall off the track, the narcoleptic left-right one-two drum beat, and the vocals that, even when doubled up with distortion and a throaty rasp, feel oddly quiet. I think it establishes the specific depressive tone that is actually reflective of the album, one of fatigue and disinterest in your own life and your own death. It’s a song that feels like watching sand fall through an hourglass, waiting and staring disinterested at the last few seconds of a kettle on the boil. The deliberately rote repetition of the lyrics reinforces this:
I hope and I pray / All that I see / I got nothin’
It’s easy to see / My pockets are deep / I got nothin’
Nowhere to go and nowhere to run / I got nothin’
Nothing to lose / Nothing but pain / I got nothin’
I think more than “Divide And Conquer,” “I Got Nothin'” establishes the album as one defined by an evolution of the depression found on their most famous, celebrated works—no longer fueled by tangible self-hatred and the most palpable, visceral anguish expressed by man, but now something more familiar, lifelong and draining.
It’s then a sharp transition to “Intentional Psychological Warfare,” which is so much louder and brighter in its introduction. The chorus has this buried melody that’s muddied by the flattened, stonewalled mix of instrumentation, and whether intentional or not it adds this immense sense of suffocation to the track. By this point in the record it hit me how, despite how swarming and thick the sound can be, it never felt anything like I’d describe as heavy. It’s notably muted and frantic in its tone and production. Coupled with the skittish, atypical instrumentation it’s like an album that’s fighting with itself at all times.
The title track “Never Give In” is notably more minimalist in its writing, and is unfortunately where the album starts to falter. It’s a song of three distinct parts, where the repetition of its first two minutes with its “I can’t find it” mantra explodes into this very ugly delivery of the “Never give in” refrain, then abruptly lurches towards tentative singer-songwriter appeal in its final few minutes. It’s very cumbersome, in a way that doesn’t work in favor of the song. Rather than it being the central, dynamic cornerstone at the heart of the album, “Never Give In” feels like the undeveloped bones of three distinct tracks wedged together to the benefit of none of their distinct qualities.
“Secret Police” leans towards something like Oxbow with its post-hardcore saxophone interpolation but is placed so awkwardly in the mix it genuinely ruins the whole track for me. I can imagine the platonic ideal of this song, one where an alto sax thickened the sound and added some really rough texture, but here the saxophone rides atop the mix like it’s fucking crowdsurfing, and feels like a massive wasted opportunity. So much of the best rock music of the 2020s has been defined by a re-emergence of the use of saxophone specifically, so I’m perhaps more critical of a song like “Secret Police” in 2025 than I would’ve been in 2015.
“Psychic Wound” is a track explicitly about betrayal, and one that can be read in the broader context of governmental, corporate betrayal and corruption as well as the titular wounds inflicted by personal, human betrayal. From the outside you’d expect a description like that to match an incredibly visceral, effective track but the shrill ostinato guitar of the song is just completely juxtaposed with the lower, trundling vocal delivery, and it leaves a huge gap in the mix that doesn’t feel like it enhances the track in either its atmosphere or delivery. It’s the final song of a three-track run that represents the nadir of the album, and doesn’t feel reflective of an album that, for all its faults, otherwise has a strong thematic whole to it.
“The Choice Is Yours” is more traditional but effective, with a simple progression underline with a clear and pronounced lead guitar melody; it’s far from revelatory in the Today Is The Day catalog but a necessary refresh after some wrong turns. It’s a much more aggressive track, with the main refrain of “I am the storm” highlighting this weird sense of empowerment and actualization the song has. It’s far from positive, but there’s this sense that the anger of the album has been momentarily directed away from the self, and as the track winds down and the driving instrumentation gives way to a more brooding, menacing outro, it’s a song that sounds briefly lucid and in control; a moment of respite in a whirlwind; the eye of the hurricane. Steve Austin’s words define the sense of absurdist resistance throughout the record:
It’s a way of life and one that is necessary in these dystopian and dark days we live in. I can’t give in. I can’t give up. As long as I have love in my heart, I’m your worst enemy.
“Pain And Frustration” is most notable for its offbeat mixture of piano blues interrupted by sheer whirlpooling instrumentation, where deep-in-the-mix siren calls play alongside blast-beats and affected harsh vocals ride atop increasingly distorted and unclear piano stabs. It’s so distinct and unusual that I quite like it; the introductory progression is so clear and unspoiled that it seems almost stock, giving the whole song a stitched-together Frankenstein appeal. In comparison, closing track “The Cleansing,” which leans towards gothic Americana with its prominent bass underpinning the bright sound of the acoustic guitar, seems much more comforting as a closer. It’s a solid ending to the album, if not the most explosive; if it’s a track that’s more reflective of the next album, the hinted-towards country record, “The Cleansing” could come to be a bridging point between both and end up aging quite well.
Never Give In is an example of the limits of numerical rating systems; of giving scores to albums. Giving this record a 2.5/5 reads like a dismissal, and that’s what most people are gonna take away from the review. In reality, Never Give In is such a bizarre, singularly weird album even in the already out-of-step discography of Today Is The Day, that my verdict is honestly one of cautious recommendation. Even at its worse—and the mid-album run is very draining—it has something uniquely ugly hiding just on its edges. If nothing else, it makes you curious about what part two could sound like.
2.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Never Give In is out now on Supernova Records.
