Never Back Down

Built in 2014, rebuilt around 2021

Never Back Down were put together in 2014 by their frontman, Daryl Gora, in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the band touring Germany in 2026 is only partly the one that started. Guitarist and clean vocalist Daniel Bisic told metal.de in August 2024 that the group began nearer hardcore and moved towards contemporary metalcore as members came and went, and that he and guitarist Marvin Schattevoi had joined roughly three years before that conversation. Bisic's first show with the band was in September 2021 at Pell Mell Festival, in front of 3,500 people, in the slot before Annisokay — a steeper introduction than most new members get.

The five-piece now runs on a split vocal: Gora takes the shouts, Bisic the choruses, with Schattevoi on second guitar, Philipp Kuppinger on bass and Andreas Brocks on drums. That division of labour is the thing Bisic says pulled him towards the genre in the first place. He started on guitar at ten or eleven with Green Day and Billy Talent, worked through Linkin Park, System of a Down, Slipknot and Bullet for My Valentine, and had formed his first metalcore band by seventeen.

A record roughly every other year

The discography reads like the output of a band that treats recording as routine rather than an event. Black and White arrived in 2018, Overdrive in 2021 after a crowdfunding campaign, and the third album, Downfall, on 19 May 2022, with the single Nullity following about a month later on 21 June. The five-track EP Pathfinder came in December 2023.

Nine months after that EP, on 9 August 2024, the fourth album appeared self-titled on Circular Wave — the gesture a band makes when it thinks it has arrived at its definitive version of itself. Guests from Chaosbay, Hollow Front and Cabal appear across it. The single One By One, released on 31 May 2024 with Chris Zuehlke of Half Me, runs barely over two minutes with no clean vocal anywhere in it, and is aimed at manipulative people.

Part of the record came out of a songwriting camp the band modelled on one the Emil Bulls run; Outcast, One by One and On the Outside all started there. Bisic told Paranoyd in July 2024 that the instrumentals get written first and the lyrics second, and that songs spent those sessions under working titles including Groovy Groove and Mofafahren. He writes the words himself and takes them from his own life, and lists NF, Connor Price, electronic music, pop and German rap among what he listens to away from metalcore.

Morecore's Mauritz Hagemann rated the album seven out of ten, crediting the band for still committing to albums in a singles market, picking Outcast as a opener that sets the template and On The Outside as the most emotionally complete thing on the record. He also found the early run of songs structurally alike, judged the rap passage in Pathfinder unconvincing and the electronic intro to Bite My Tongue wasted in the final mix, and concluded that the band could get more out of itself by taking bigger risks.

2026: Redshift, then Not Your Mold

The year opened with Redshift on 20 February 2026, a song about the death of a family member, framed by the band as something for listeners who had been through the same loss. The headline tour named after it ran from 21 March in Donaueschingen through Hamburg, Erfurt, Munich, Berlin, Cologne and Leipzig to 10 April, with About Monsters and Mayflower opening.

Burn For You followed on 22 June 2026, by which point it had already been played live — it turns up in the Munich set on 1 April, logged as unreleased. Disintegrate came on 2 October, and the fifth album, Not Your Mold, sixteen tracks long, on 17 October 2026. The pattern of the last two years holds: singles seeded into the live set months early, then collected.

Where they stand now

Never Back Down remain a club-level band with a touring record out of proportion to their profile. Their own count puts them past 300 concerts, and the support slots they have taken — Electric Callboy, Landmvrks, Thy Art Is Murder, Stray From The Path — are the ones that put a German metalcore band in front of rooms it could not fill alone. The first headline tour came in 2024, with a lighting production the band specified itself rather than taking the house rig.

The gap between that workload and their documented footprint is striking. Setlist.fm holds eleven setlists for the band in total, logged by thirteen users. Bisic's own read on the audience is that metalcore fans stay loyal and still buy physical CDs alongside streaming, which is roughly the economics the band's release schedule assumes. Right now one date is on sale: 12 December 2026 at the Kulturfabrik in Krefeld.

What the show is

The documented Redshift tour set, from the Backstage in Munich on 1 April 2026, ran to fourteen songs: Outcast first, then The Gallow, Sleepwalking, the then-unreleased Burn For You, Fear of Failure, Dystopia, Nullity, One By One, Redshift, Singularity, We are the Ones and Best of Me, with Downfall and Karma held back for the encore. Those are mostly short songs — One By One barely clears two minutes — so the shape is a sequence of fast, self-contained hits rather than a long arc.

Krefeld in December is a different kind of night. The band has made a year-end show there a fixture, the previous one sold out quickly, and they describe the Kulturfabrik date as closing the year with what they call the NBD family. Support is still unannounced.