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The Unforgiving is the fifth studio album by Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation, released by Roadrunner Records on March 25, 2011. The album was released alongside a comic book series and a series of short films, to encompass a concept story. The first single, "Faster", was released on January 21, and the first short film, Mother Maiden, was released ten days later on January 31. The second short film, Sinéad was released on March 21, and the second single with the same name on July 15. The first issue of the comic books, Penance, Part One, was released on March 18, 2011, and digitally released by Diamond Digital at the New York Comic Con on October 22. The second issue, Penance, Part Two was released on May 13. The third issue, Penance, Part Three, was released on August 31 and the fourth issue, Penance, Part Four, on November 2. As of November 2012, the album reportedly sold 313,790 copies exclusively on the iTunes merch website.

The initial concept was to write the soundtrack to a film, however the band decided to change direction given the inconsistencies and other issues which movies can undergo. As vocalist Sharon den Adel commented:

"What happened was that we wanted to write lyrics for a movie. We were searching for a good movie with a good story and everybody had different release dates. If something goes wrong, a movie can very easily be postponed for a year, and we couldn't take the chance to have to wait for that, otherwise we would have had to postpone our album as well. So we decided to take the matter in our own hands."

In searching for a new concept, they approached the writer of The Chronicles of Spellborn comics, who introduced the band to Steven O'Connell. However, upon his first meeting with the band, he failed to impress them with ideas involving zombies and fantasy, while they were hoping for a more mature approach rather than something unclear and superficial. Sharon explained that, in trying to describe to O'Connell what they were looking for,

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