This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This!

This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This! is the second studio album by English rock band Pop Will Eat Itself, released on 1 May 1989 by RCA Records. It builds upon the band's 1987 debut Box Frenzy in its extensive usage of sampling, combining influences from punk rock, hip hop, heavy metal, and disco music, with samples and lyrics that reference, among many subjects, pop culture and otaku culture. Particularly influential on the album's musical style were hip hop group Public Enemy, while the album's own subtle post-punk touches would later be credited as influential. Some critics regard it as a sound collage. The album artwork, designed by The Designer's Republic, touches on nuclear warfare themes.

The album peaked at #24 for two weeks on the UK Albums Chart, and at #169 on the US Billboard 200 for six weeks. The three singles from the album – "Def. Con. One", "Can U Dig It?", and "Wise Up! Sucker" – were among the band's most successful to date. The album received critical acclaim, with praise for its invention, humour, and self-contained style. Cherry Red Records released a two-disc deluxe edition of the album in 2011 that includes unreleased bonus tracks.

The Stourbridge-based Pop Will Eat Itself started in 1986 as a Buzzcocks-influenced indie rock band. Though initially associated with the C86 scene, their rougher, rockier sound led to them being championed by the music press as one of several grebo bands that were emerging from Midlands, with the word "grebo" itself having been revived by the band. Band member Graham Crabb said: "We revived this '70s [slang] word for dork or nerd, and the press had to build this movement around it to describe everyone with long hair and a nasty guitar sound." The band thought their musical style was "pretty much going down a cul de sac" until they found numerous other "more interesting" influences. Crabb reflected: "We just started listening to a lot of new stuff, stuff we hadn't heard before. We saw Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys come over and play, and they blew us away."

Having been inspired by groups such as Age of Chance, the band immersed themselves with sampling, drawing material from artists as disparate as Iggy Pop and James Brown, while Crabb would quickly join Clint Mansell as the band's second frontman after his previous tenure as the band's drummer, while a drum machine took that place. The success of the band's debut album Box Frenzy (1987) led to increased interest of the band's second album.

This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This! was produced by Flood, who one critic felt brought his notable production talent to the fore of the album, helping shape it into becoming "its own sprawling but self-contained universe". Dave Pine engineered the album with assistance from Karl Broadie. Nonetheless, numerous songs on the album feature different engineers and producers; for example, "Can U Dig It?" was produced by David Steele and Andy Cox of Fine Young Cannibals and formerly The Beat, while "Def. Con. One" features production by Robert Gordon and turntable scratching from DJ Winston, both influential figures in the birth of Sheffield bleep techno. "Wild guitar" is contributed to two songs by The Buzzard, while "Stun guitar" is played by Frank Booth on "Preaching to the Perverted."

This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This! features the band's unique "mesh and mix" of pop culture from the United States and particularly the United Kingdom, and combines metal guitar riffs, disco backing and conspicuous drum stomps. Influences of rap, heavy metal and the band's early influence of punk rock are spliced with numerous "found" auto artefacts "collected from all over the junk-culture landscape", including Motown snippets, advertising slogans and the "play-by-play call of a John Elway touchdown pass. Throughout the album, there are what AllMusic's Ned Raggett described as "intriguing surprises", including multiple moody goth and post-punk elements. The music press found the band's sound hard to categorise. Band member Graham Crabb explained: "Nobody's really come up with a description of what we do, and we're quite happy about that. It gives us absolute freedom."

With the album's heavy usage of sampling, Trouser Press called the album a sound collage and noted the influence of the band's affection for Blade Runner's "sci-fi nihilism" and the innovative comic books of Alan Moore. Joe Boehm of the LA Times agreed the album was an "assaultive" sound collage, writing that the eclectic album is a "funny smorgasboard in which a seemingly endless array of pop styles and media messages are sampled, tasted and either spat out or savoured (Rick Astley, nuclear warfare, fast food and alcoholism fail to meet the taste test; science-fiction fantasy and pop styles that are noisy, emphatic, and identified with troublemakers win the blue ribbon)." Robin Reinhardt of Spin noted the influence of Public Enemy, and Crabb would later state that the influence of Public Enemy's second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) was "stamped, trodden and embedded" within This Is the Day. Band member Clint Mansell elaborated on this:

We definitely like the format of Public Enemy's album in the fact it all runs together. It doesn't really stop. Some tracks are intermingles and things like that. Our songs '16 Different Flavours of Hell' and 'PWEI Is a Four Letter Word' are sort of short, cut up things. That's something we took from Public Enemy because we really liked it. Sampling is just something we're into really. We were described as being a piece of blotting paper because we soak so many things. I suppose that's what we do. We're open to a lot of influences and music is changing all the time.