You need to understand how big of a deal it is for Converge to tell us that Love Is Not Enough. Their eleventh album, arriving 36 years after the band’s formation, is their second with “love” in the title, and their eleventh with “love” appearing at least once (but usually many more times) in the lyric sheet. Converge made their name by taking hardcore and making it more knotty and abrasive, as if they were distressing a new pair of jeans. But they have always focused their aggression on heightening empathy rather than rejecting it. Their 2001 breakout, Jane Doe, is still one of the nastiest sounding albums ever recorded, and it’s tempting to pit that sound against the heartfelt lyrics. But, as is most evident on “Heaven in Her Arms,” that roiling tumult mirrors the internal rollercoaster that comes with emotional bloodletting:
“I just needed a lover and I needed a friend
And there you were
Running from forever like all the rest
Three simple words bled me dry
Three simple word bled us dry, bled us dry
I love you”
No score yet, be the first to add.
It’s been nine years since the last proper Converge album, and in the interim, the band linked up with doom-folk singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe for 2021’s meandering, ostentatious, and uneven collaboration, Bloodmoon: I. It might be shocking to hear Converge open their latest with four lean, brutal barn-burners—reflecting the “no frills, no BS” mission offered by frontman Jacob Bannon in a recent interview—but the album eventually concludes with a suite of longer, more methodical tracks.
Human connection has always been the motivating force in Bannon’s lyrics, and his approach tends to be hyper-personal while still opaque enough to invite interpretation. He usually operates in first-person, and it rarely seems like he’s invoking perspectives other than his own, but his lack of specificity almost always spurns proper nouns. He continues to keep things vague on Love Is Not Enough, an album that splits its focus between big-picture outrage and internal reckonings with mortality. The refrain of the opening title track, “Love is not enough/To fend off the scavengers,” could feasibly belong to any disillusioned post-Reagan punk band. On the other hand, Bannon wrote the album closer in a funeral home parking lot, and his lyrics lament the fact that death is the easiest way to bring people together.
Love Is Not Enough is split between two distinct halves: the first more blistering and political, the second more moody and personal. There’s still a clear linked sentiment—that our traditional understanding of “love” either needs an update or an expansion to maintain its value in modern life. For a band in its fourth decade, whose ages range between 45 and 52, this is a particularly generative notion. The sense of desperate searching connects the mass-pacification protest “To Feel Something,” for instance, and the opiate addiction lament “Gilded Cage.” “Systematically we seethe,” he shouts. “Pharmaceutically we bleed.”
