Today Is The Day were protagonists of one of the most visceral and infernal sounds of the 1990s, straddling grindcore, noise-rock, death metal, hardcore, and industrial music. Today Is The Day were formed in Nashville (Tennessee) by Steve Austin (vocals and guitar), Brad Elrod (drums), and Mike Herrell (bass), and debuted with the single I Bent Scared (Scale 56, 1993).

Supernova (Amphetamine Reptile, 1993) evokes the early Butthole Surfers, the MC5, early Melvins, and the bombings of Baghdad during the Gulf War. The terrifying harmonies of the record sink their roots into nightmare-songs like Black Dahlia and The Kick Inside, the two pillars of the work, built from rhythmic sobs, obscene shrieks, and grotesque riffs. The ferocity recalls that of the Laughing Hyenas, but the compositions are those of a cerebral form of progressive rock. The free cacophonies of Silver Tongue suggest Art Bears in a punk version or a Cage concert performed by the Jesus Lizard. The slow, powerful monster of 6 Dementia Satyr is born from a sacrilegious coupling of Black Sabbath and King Crimson—the former’s heavy cadenza and the latter’s tortuous elaborations. The album’s heroin-drenched peak, Goose Is Cooked, is a kind of Led Zeppelin blues slowed and warped out of time until both voice and instruments are disfigured.
Experimentation reaches its extreme limits in the instrumental tracks: in the off-kilter electro-acoustic dance of Blind Man At Mystic Lake, in the piercing glissando solo of The Begging, and in the dissonant free-jazz of Self Portrait, the equivalent of rock as Picasso. Austin channels David Yow (Jesus Lizard) with desperate barking, unable to narrate lyrics, only able to bite into notes and rhythms.

After the EP Clusterfuck, Willpower (Amphetamine Reptile, 1994) was released. Austin’s screams became even more terrifying, the time changes even more “progressive.” The avant-garde pieces disappear, but the songs are filled with cacophonous interludes. Just as furious but far more refined (as if a maniac stopped hacking his victim and began chiseling instead), the album rests on the darkest pillars of Will Power, which dissolves into an anguished lament, and Side Winder, where the unrestrained noise of the work is broken into a sequence of emotional states. Gratuitous bursts of violence like My First Knife are contrasted with pieces in which spasmodic tension is channeled into forms that are no less theatrical but at least more structured. Suddenly the atmosphere calms, and the blues of Nothing To Lose sounds like the Rolling Stones played at the wrong speed. Granite riffs support Austin’s psychotic whisper (!) in Golden Calf. Every track is a heart attack, a natural catastrophe, a brutal, stormy, uncontrollable event, constantly mutating.

Two years of silence followed. With Scott Wexton on samples replacing Herrell, Today Is The Day (Amphetamine Reptile, 1996) refines a sound that has become a hybrid of heavy metal and progressive rock. Marked increasingly indulges King Crimson– and Art Bears–style irregular time signatures, intellectual arrangements, and apocalyptic melodrama. Death March instead descends from the darkest death metal, while the terrifying charge of Realization, one of the most powerful riffs of their career, transcends genre and sinks its claws into the fire of hell. That unrelenting fury does not subside, brushing against pure tragic madness in Ripped Off and pure psychotic neurosis in Dot Matrix. This highly emotional macabre concept work shifts its center of gravity toward unfathomable darkness.

It is hard to believe that Temple Of The Morning Star (Relapse, 1997) is the same band that produced the excellent Supernova, Today Is The Day, and Willpower. With Christopher Reeser on samples, Steve Austin on vocals and guitar, and new drummer Mike Hyde, the band has made enormous progress on all fronts. Hyde is a high-powered rhythmic locomotive. Wexton expands the sound with the strangest effects, and Austin, having toned down his vocal savagery, vents through guitar blasts worthy of speed metal. The record is a sophisticated collage of styles and techniques. Opening with the gothic folk of the title track, it plunges into the electronic sludge of The Man Who Loves To Hurt Himself (as if Karlheinz Stockhausen sampled Johnny Cash), before launching into brutal death metal in the same piece and in the emphatic Blindspot and High As The Sky, crushed under ever more exhausting riffs. Electronics rip apart the guts of this emotionally barren music and gradually take over. The songs fragment, shrink, and distort into smoky anarchy in Crunch and violent dissonance in Satan Is Alive. A martial Rabid Lassie reassembles the narrative thread, which finds both antithesis and catharsis in the instrumental I See You for acoustic guitar and synthesizer. Above all stand two morbid meditations like Kill Yourself, Root Of All Evil, and My Life With You, peaks of their infernal melodrama at the intersection of gothic folk, death metal, and electronic abstraction—the three sonic identities of the group.
The slow, relentless eight-minute Hermaphrodite functions as a death dance, while the grand finale is an apocryphal, verbose version of the title track, entirely different from the opening one—initially bestial and tribal, yet also melodic—closing in a long distortion-like mantra. The mass remains unresolved, but it is clear that this time there was a dramatic arc, and Austin attempted to tell a story, perhaps the story of his troubled ego. This Nashville collective thus stands alongside Neurosis and Unsane among the great saboteurs of noise-rock.

Austin relocated to Massachussetts and enrolled a new drummer (Bran Dailor) and a new bassist (Bill Kelliher), both formerly of Lethargy, He must have also started listening to his Napalm Death tapes, because the new Today Is The Day bore little resemblance to the previous one. In The Eyes Of God (Relapse, 1999) came as a shock even from somebody like Austin who had always surprised the audience and the critics with every new album. The album lined up 20 short tracks of super-charged grindcore and religious cult-inspired lyrics. Taking off with the demented cardiac arrest of In The Eyes Of God, TITD careens through the macabre visions and atrocious screams of Spotting A Unicorn and The Power Of Psychic Power. Austin spits insults and obscenities with visceral hate, while the drums hammer mercilessly and the bass lays down a layer of sinister noise. Reinventing heavy metal is not an easy chore: The agonizing Going To Hell opens with medieval soprano and monk choir; Martial Law fakes a hoedown before plunging into a frenzy; Argali borrows the Black Sabbath's slow, grinding groove and the King Crimson's majestic riffing. There Is No End explores a broad territory of grindcore, progressive-rock and musique concrete. Hell could not be darker than this.

Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor went on to form Mastodon.

The two-disc satanic monolith Sadness Will Prevail (Relapse, 2002) is chock full of devastating riffs, terrifying vocals and supernatural electronics, thus unleashing a fury that rivals their classic albums. More than any previous versions of the band, this trio (Steve Austin on guitar, vocals, samples and piano, Marshall Kilpatric on drums, Chris Debari on bass) is a symbiotic unit, despite the fact that the members may be less virtuosi than their predecessors.
After the ceremonial opener at martial stoner pace, Maggots And Riots, the lethal charge and miasma of Criminal (introduced by the sound of a modem) digs deep into the trio's reservoir of truculence. However, Austin rarely repeats himself. The instrumental Unearthed is Jimi Hendrix for zombies, channeled into an unrelenting repetition of smoldering riffs (Orthrelm ante litteram). The pure psychological tension of The Descent (cascading feedback until exhaustion) and Face After The Shot (cascading fusion-style riffs until a creepy piano coda) quickly assumes the leading role in the tragedy.
Austin throws in an impressive array of experimental structures that contribute to reconstruct the horror atmospheres: the Middle-Eastern music for radio interference of Distortion Of Nature, the possessed vocals, chaotic dissonances (evoking multitudes of cannibal insects) and pastoral piano figures Butterflies (one of the band's standouts), the infernal march of The Ivory Of Self-Hate for voices, drums and violin, etc.
The sprawling scope of this work finds room for the eerie piano ballad Death Requiem, reminiscent of Art Bears' progressive-rock, as well as the hardcore mayhem of the seven-minute Invincible (that slowly decays into prog-rock angst) and the eight-minute screaming, bombasting psychodrama of Sadness Will Prevail (with a coda of electronically manipulated screams).
By the time the first disc is over, one realizes that the sinister, agonizing metal of Christianized Magick, woven around the soliloquy of a street bum, and of The Nailing, the most Black Sabbath-ian track, only plays the marginal role of a business card, that of a recognizable feature of the band, while the message is elsewhere.
The schizophreny worsens on the second disc, that casually alternates the six-minute panzer crescendo of Myriad and the pseudo-Japanese classical music Your Life Is Over, the instrumental six-minute Black Sabbath-ian bacchanal Control The Media and the spectral a-cappella chant of Vivicide, the King Crimson-style pomp of Times Of Pain and the piano and triangles interlude of Friend the macabre Amon Duul II-style dance of I Live To See You Smile and the neo-classical sonata Sadness Will Prevail Theme 1 (with a lengthy coda of deconstructed field recordings). The centerpiece of the second disc is the 23-minute juggernaut Never Answer The Phone, that opens with six minutes of spoken-word art but then launches into an instrumental galloping fantasia that is "the" sound of fear (besides being the post-metal equivalent of a Bach fugue).
With this album Today Is The Day learned how to use repetition as a weapon, the lesson of the "minimalist" avantgarde of the 1960s. At the same time, Austin's electronic and digital manipulations added yet another dimension to a sound that had been growing in all directions.

Kiss The Pig (Relapse, 2004) is another terrifying vision by Steve Austin and his helpers, although not as ambitious as the previous one. This much shorter and straightforward work actually sounds like an attempt to reconnect with their roots. Steve Austin's guitar claws are brutal, the beat of Mike Rosswag's drums is epileptic, Austin's lyrics full of hate, Chris Debari's bass earth-shaking. The whole approaches the effect of a blast furnace, oscillating between the hardcore frenzy of Why They Hate Us and the metal pomp of This Machine Kills Fascists and Don't Tread on Hope The incoherent structures of Kiss The Pig and Platinum Pussy betray agony and despair. The angst is so intense that is reduced to a simple screaming in Outland. Alas, the longest piece, Birthright, is a bit too melodramatic for its own sake. Overall, the album is vastly inferior to the previous ones. It was a pointless detour.

Axis of Eden (Relapse, 2007) was a massive disappointment, the first album by the band that totally lacked imagination or passion, dull and bland.