Very few bands get to double digits when it comes to records out there in the world, and fewer still can lay claim to the level of consistent excellence maintained by metalcore pioneers Converge across a 35-year career. On their 11th album, ‘Love Is Not Enough’, they continue to turn out some of the best heavy music on the planet.
Converge have always operated on the fringes — influencing and creating entire subgenres away from the glare of the mainstream. Evolving from a scrappy hardcore band to a group capable of embracing unbridled emotion during a peerless mid-career run, their energy remains undimmed.
In its ramshackle, noisy chaos, ‘Love Is Not Enough’ is a reaction to 2021’s experimental, post-metal opus ‘Bloodmoon: I’, which found Converge collaborating with goth experimentalist Chelsea Wolfe, among others.
Its title track is all piss and vinegar, Kurt Ballou’s riffs cascading before the brakes come off altogether. Beyond Repair seethes with quiet menace, while Distract and Divide flirts with grindcore as it tears through 90 seconds of abject fury.
Eschewing a closing epic, Converge close out the LP with a triple threat to rival anything in their catalogue. Nate Newton’s bass explores sludgy recesses on Gilded Cage and ramshackle punk on Make Me Forget You, which builds to emotional bloodletting. Finally, We Were Never The Same closes in a collision of post-metal and hardcore that collapses in on itself at breakneck speed.
There’s no stone left unturned in this outpouring of raw feeling. Jacob Bannon’s voice remains undiminished: a fraught, chaotic scream into the void that gives the impression he is emptying himself of everything. ‘Love Is Not Enough’ proves that Converge are still, and perhaps will always be, extreme music’s most vital band.
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