For Today isn't your average Christian band, or even your average Christian hardcore band. The group has ventured into the mainstream market carried by brutally heavy music and an even more forward gospel message of grace. 

Even with stints on heavy music megatour Warped Tour, among other major mainstream tours, under their belts, the band has never once wavered in their unshakable desire to share the message of Jesus Christ with a desperate generation. Albums like Immortal and Fight the Silence have become benchmark releases in contemporary hardcore, giving the group a unique credibility. 

For Today frontman Mattie Montgomery sat down with us at Creation Northeast to talk about the band's unique perspective and their upcoming album.

You do festivals like Creation, then you also do things like Warped Tour. Is there anything that's different about the way you approach the different settings you play in?

I think in a lot of ways it's a different culture at Warped Tour then at, say, Creation Festival. There's one culture that pretty openly denies the existence of God, or maybe even if it doesn't go as far as to deny it, it ignores the existence of God. So there I preach the gospel, and I introduce Christ. 

And I'll preach the gospel here at Creation Fest tonight. But here I think the thing that we're coming against is a culture of many people, not to say all of them, but many people who acknowledge God with their mouths and deny His existence by their lifestyle. As a result, the thing that I preach here is not so much "you need to believe in God," because I bet everybody at Creation would say that they believe in God. But here I say "well, if you really do believe in God, it's going to show itself in the way that you live your life. If you really have been saved from Hell by the blood of Jesus, then please, for the sake of a dead and dying world, don't keep that to yourself."

So yeah, I think that the message that I bring at a place like Creation Festival, while it's still fundamentally the gospel, is a lot different than the message that I would preach at most of the other events we would do, which are primarily secular.

Do you feel that there are ways the hardcore genre is able to be a ministry vehicle in ways that other genres could not be? What do you think makes hardcore special?

I think playing hardcore and metal music offers a unique ability to be involved in the music industry as a whole instead of just a Christian version of the music industry. I see it in pop music: there's pop music that makes it on mainstream radio, then there's Christian pop music that makes it on Christian radio. There's rap music, and then there's Christian rap music. And that's its own sort of world. There's not a lot of crossover. 

However, in our world we'll play Creation Festival this month, and last month we were on tour with a band like Motionless In White who has pentagrams and upside down crosses on their T-Shirts For Men's. Because of this kind of music-- maybe because it's a smaller community of bands and artists, I don't know why-- but for whatever reason, in spite of the fact that we're Christians, we're able to mingle with the rest of the world. People who maybe don't view the world the way we do. And that's such a cool opportunity. It's a thing that I love.

Something that has always frustrated me about the church is our tendency to hide in our four walls. And we say "alright, we don't need your music industry, we're going to make one of our own." And it's like man, if I really think that this Jesus I'm preaching is valuable and is beautiful, then I should be taking this message to the people who aren't hearing it. I think people need what we have.

So we have a really unique opportunity playing this type of music to get put in scenarios like Warped Tour, where we were the only Christian band on a tour with I think 900 people. Not to mention there were four, five, six, even ten thousand people coming every day. So to be able to preach to a culture of people that by and large are ignoring our God is such a cool opportunity that we're given because we don't function in the Christian music industry. I may never win a Dove Award, but I think the tens of thousands of souls that we're winning instead is enough of a consolation for me. 

So what is For Today up to for the rest of the year?

Well, since you guys are big on new releases... we just finished a new album like two days ago. We got the mixes for them in literally the day before yesterday. So we have a new album coming out in the fall. I'm not sure exactly when, but it's going to be called Awake. And we're very, very excited about it. Musically and lyrically it's a very different direction from anything we've done before. But I can say that this is by far the most creative, the most inspired and the deepest album that we've ever written. And I'm excited for people to get to hear it.