(written by Islander)
We live in a time of trauma and constant distraction, bombarded by personally damaging events beyond our control, emotional turmoil caused by damage to others, and bafflements produced by algorithmically generated slop and delusion. When it gets to be too much, it might numb us to what matters — tuning-out as self-protection, theoretically for the better but ultimately for the worse.
The title of a new album that will be released tomorrow by the Italian post-hardcore band If I Die Today provoked these dreary musings. Its name is I Felt Nothing, and lyrically it does explore the darker sides of humanity.
But the music is anything but dreary, and it’s about as far away from numbness as you could want — a conclusion we think you’ll reach for yourselves when you hear the album in its entirety via our streaming premiere below.
Over the course of nearly 20 years, an evolving discography, and extensive live performances, If I Die Today have positioned themselves at a crossroads of hardcore, metal, and rock’n’roll that’s now best represented (and most confidently represented) on this furious new album.
There’s an undeniable sense of urgency to the music. As the band themselves say, it’s their “most aggressive and hot-tempered work” released to date. One listen to the album’s opening song will convince you of that.
“Lungs” is fast; it hammers hard; its low end sounds like a tunnel-boring machine working in overdrive; its riffing generates a furiously mangling sonic barrage; and the vocals scream with wrenching intensity.
But that song also displays the kind of dynamic changes that become a hallmark of all the tracks. The pacing slows and blankets the listener in bleakness; it bounds and pounds with a feral punk energy; it spins out spiraling lead-guitar arpeggios and a sequence near the end that sounds like the unnerving pulse of frantic warning sirens.
Like “Lungs“, the follow-on “King” inflicts raking and searing riffs coated in abrasion, bowel-loosening bass undulations, skull-busting beats, and scorch-the-earth vocals. The song is also threaded with manically writhing fretwork that pierces the mind (and doesn’t sound healthy), but it also slows, and feedback whines — creating an unsettling bridge to an even more unsettling phase of immense, heaving heaviness, plaintive singing, and a dense acid-wash of guitars — with all hell breaking loose again at the end.
The vocal variations in “King” are repeated elsewhere in the following songs, thanks in part to guest contributions on some of them. Screaming tirades are dominant, but singing in different emotional registers (from shattering to morose), dismal spoken words, and gang yells add to the music’s changing character.
The following songs (most of them quite compact) also continue brawling, battering, and stomping with palpable physical force, while repeatedly bringing in a wide array of attention-grabbing lead-guitar machinations (some delirious, some miserable, some eerily strange), nimble bass-lines, and electrifying drum progressions in the midst of riffing that crashes, slashes, pulsates, roils, flickers, and groans.
The tempos and emotional qualities of the songs also continue varying in the midst of all the hard-charging and immensely muscle-moving propulsiveness. The music repeatedly rages, but also becomes oppressively grim, feverishly confused, and almost hopelessly distraught. It creates tension, it unsettles, and it explodes.
If played loud enough you could use this music to plow through a city and leave smoking rubble in its wake, or just throw people around a mosh pit like ball-bearings in a tumble drier, or sink souls pretty low. What you won’t ever become is… numb.
(My two cents, but probably the band’s as well: Not caring (even when it seems pointless) and not feeling (even when it hurts) means nothing will get better.)
And finally, we want to share with you the band’s own statement about the record:
So here we are. It took a while, but almost one year after we entered Dano’s studio at Turin Docks — our favourite place, where we also happen to have our rehearsal room — we are finally thrilled to share I Felt Nothing, our latest LP, with everyone. Eleven tracks representing the fastest, most aggressive and hot-tempered work ever released by If I Die Today (so far…).
This time we fully embraced a DIY approach, from songwriting to production.
When it came to the composition process, we simply let things flow while jamming together, then we shaped and recorded the songs with Dano, our FOH engineer for more than a decade. Lyrically, Frez kept exploring the darker side of humanity, but this time focusing on actual reality rather than drawing inspiration from art, leaving more space for personal emotions and for exploring and exposing our deepest contradictions. If The Abyss In Silence was some sort of black mass, then I Felt Nothing is a disturbing exorcism with no mercy and no compromises.
For the production, we involved independent labels run by friends from Poison Hearts, Tifone Crew, Vollmer Industries, Masseria Autogestita Foresta, Flames Don’t Judge Records, L’Oltraggio Produzioni and Shove Records, and we then managed the process of printing the LP ourselves — a first for If I Die Today.
This time, more than ever, we simply did what felt natural to us, without any compromises. We like to think of I Felt Nothing as the most authentic and genuine record we have ever created. A true family matter.
We hope you will enjoy it.
IF I DIE TODAY:
Marco – Voice
Morgan – Guitar
Andrea – Bass
Marco – Drums
I Felt Nothing was produced and mixed by Dano Battocchio at Deepest Sea Studio, mastered by Will Putney at Graphic Nature Studio, and features striking cover artwork by Alberto Becherini.
As noted above, the album will be released on June 19th in co-production with Tifone Crew, Vollmer, Flamesdontjudge, Shove Records, Poison Hearts, Oltraggio Produzioni, and Masseria Autogestita.
It comes recommended For fans of: Converge, Every Time I Die, Zao, Old Man Gloom, and The Hope Conspiracy.
PRE-ORDER:
https://ifidietoday.bandcamp.com/album/i-felt-nothing
IF I DIE TODAY:
https://linktr.ee/ifidietoday
https://www.facebook.com/ifidietodayhc
https://instagram.com/ifidietoday_official