“Wake Up Now, Do Not Cower”: Converge’s Hum of Hurt
“We must run deep into the night.”
Back in February, titans of titans Converge released Love is Not Enough, their first new material since 2021’s lackluster collaboration with Chelsea Wolfe Bloodmoon: I and 2017’s disappointing The Dusk in Us. Both a return to form and a grand declaration of the band’s continued growth, Love is Not Enough was the band’s best record since the near-perfect All We Love We Leave Behind. On its best song, the achingly wistful “Make Me Forget You,” Converge returned to the thrashy, melodic hardcore of that record to write a post-American Nightmare heartbreaker. The entire record, in effect, is the band borrowing and paying homage to various contemporaries over their 36-year career and weaving it into their own unmistakable sound. “Bad Faith” intermingles a Hatebreed-by-way-of-Entombed breakdown with You Fail Me-era Converge before ending with a nod to Mastodon’s Leviathan. Mastodon’s influence is scrimmed in whalebone on following track “Distract and Divide,” which is 90 seconds of jaw-dropping Remission-styled sludge. On “Amon Amok,” the band wraps No Heroes around the kind of chugging post-metal riff that made early career Isis and Pelican indispensable. Dipping even into the mosh-crazed hardcore of the early 00s, “Force Meets Presence” starts with a riff that sounds so much like the start of Kids Like Us’s “Fuck the Art Bar” from their 2003 demo that I can’t stop myself from chanting, “You’re weak! You’re weak! You’re weak!” To be clear, I’m not saying Jacksonville’s KLU had any influence on Love is Not Enough; you can insert whatever gang vocal you want in this moment. What strikes me as important is the force of its very presence in the song. Converge, as in control of their craft as any band on the planet, is here reveling in the impact they’ve had on metal and hardcore since 1990 and the simultaneous impact metal and hardcore has had on them.
For all the fun the band is having sonically on Love is Not Enough, it is a dark, desperate, and determined record. So much of what feels passionately personal can be easily translated to the boldly political and back. The album’s title invokes both the innocuous, insipid liberalism of “Love Conquers Hate” banners and the stark realization of when such feelings are not enough to sustain a partnership, friendship, or marriage. “You can’t give up / I can’t give up / They can’t give up / We can’t give up, on us,” Jacob Bannon repeats on “Bad Faith,” a pleading for interpersonal amelioration and a rallying cry for those weary from ever-resisting state- and court-sanctioned brutality. “Beyond Repair,” the album’s bifurcating Supermachiner-esque interlude, defines equally a relationship that can’t be mended as it does an empire in decline. Certainly, tracks such as “Distract and Divide,” “Amon Amok,” and “Gilded Cage” are fierce, fiery political declarations, and it is their teeth-gnashing violence mixed with their flag-planting resistance that soothe and enflame at once. On album closer “We Were Never the Same,” the ever-shifting “we” returns, the “we” that is all of us in this together forever and the “we” that is the two of us that could never survive it. “There are no words / or a comfort that / would complete us.” What a shattering recognition of incompatibility and fracture. What a passionate, ferocious call to arms to fight for a different world.
To release an album like Love is Not Enough 36 years into your band’s career is a testament in its own right. To follow it up, 4 short months later, with another album of unimpeachable quality is to again demonstrate that there has never been and maybe never will be another band like Converge. Hum of Hurt stands on its own as the more experimental of the two records, finding the band succeeding where past experiments—the aforementioned Bloodmoon: I—failed. “Slip the Noose” nearly touches the unshackled foment of Jane Doe, and, in its way, hints at the rock and roll panache of the rest of the album. Mixing together Every Time I Die, Jesus Lizard, Neurosis, and Botch, Hum of Hurt is a noise-rock/metalcore/hardcore behemoth. Slower tracks like “Doom in Bloom” and “Detonator” are hooky and snarling, the latter feeling particularly like new territory for the band. “Detonator” is intensely confessional (“There is something that I must admit / Giving up is starting to make sense”) and colossal in scope, focalizing Nate Newton’s time in Cave In and Doomriders. “I Won’t Let You Go,” another standout, is spastic and plaintive, but, like every other song on Hum of Hurt, it ultimately coheres. While Hum of Hurt might not quite reach the heights of Love is Not Enough, it is a thoroughly spellbinding album, a particularly evocative attempt to capture everything still spilling out from Love is Not Enough.
As I’ve been thinking through Hum of Hurt over the last month, I’ve more than once been drawn to Edward Said’s On Late Style, but I’m then left wondering if it’s a natural or forced pairing. In the essay “Time and Lateness,” Said wonders, “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of ‘ripeness is all’?” In the next paragraph, he writes, “I’d like to explore the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against…” “There is,” he states bluntly, “no transcendence or unity.” In the bodily reality of angst and passion of both Love is Not Enough and Hum of Hurt, we certainly feel that refutation of transcendence, that “nonserene tension,” that disunity. But that is all undercut, stridently so, by the kinds of unity Bannon presses for in his lyrics and the band’s songcraft. Recalling “Coral Blue,” the 6-minute epic “Dream Debris” is case in point. In its very title, the song has to merge the latent and the manifest, the incorporeal with the substantial. What could be more ephemeral than a dream? What could be more concrete than debris? With Bannon at his most metaphysical, the band also sets out the task of melding together the grimmest, more forlorn atmosphere of either album with its heaviest, sludgiest ragings. Not unlike “Coral Blue,” the song is a haunting and exalting drama acted out with precision.
We are returned, by album’s end, to the dis/harmonious tension and teetering dis/unity of both Love is Not Enough and Hum of Hurt. On “Hum of Hurt,” Bannon laments, “I’m not the man / I wanted to be.” “I know this one hurts,” he bellows with a cruel and unforgiving finality. As Newton’s bass and Ben Koller’s drums fade out, that sense of finality settles in, nearly leaving us widowed and hopeless. That can’t be and Converge knows it. Closer “Nothing is Over,” still as oddball and off-kilter as so much of Hum of Hurt, is the contrapuntal response. “Get up now, nothing’s over,” starts the song, one that invokes Dylan Thomas in its spirited repudiation of bureaucracy, theocracy, and technology. The battle cry “Autonomy is the fight for our lives” brings us to the tension of I/we, of the autonomous and the collective. If by the end of Love is Not Enough, “We Were Never the Same” in a way that taught us nothing and everything, then by the end of Hum of Hurt, we will never again be the same as we “march headlong” and “take no cover.” “To be late meant therefore,” writes Said, “to be late for (and refuse) many of the rewards offered up by being comfortable inside society.” For all of Bannon’s lyrics and Kurt Ballou’s impeccable guitar work, songwriting, and execution alongside Newton and Koller, there is this refusal of comfortability, of contentedness, of submission. True, Converge are not classical composers nor theorists creating at the end of their lives, but their late-era is a lateness of style that takes up what it means to be inside society and opposed to it at the same time. Whatever else hardcore might be, it is the violence of that contradiction, and as Converge might be the best hardcore band to have ever existed, it is fitting that in one year and between two albums, they would attack that paradox with so much vitality, enthusiasm, and heart.
Hum of Hurt is out now
via Epitaph.
