In spite of the ubiquity of the dumb phrase “we are so back”, I don’t think it has ever been more apt as when Converge descended on us again this year. As such a mega institution of racket making at this point, just a whisper of the name makes you brace yourself for a bone-battering that won’t actually materialise, and make peace with the fact your tinnitus will arrive duly. We wouldn’t have it any other way, and we don’t have to.
Their ninth (Converge only) release Hum Of Hurt arrives as a (sorta) sister album to the replenished force that was February’s Love Is Not Enough, a more cutthroat, volatile and slim version of 2017’s neo-gothic The Dusk In Us. The gang’s purpose seems evident with the quick dealing of these two half-hour wrecking balls; a harassed frilled lizard display that they’re still as fiercely unmatched as before on the similarly concise career highlights You Fail Me and No Heroes. As Kurt Ballou said, “there are songs on Bloodmoon that I barely played guitar on”, and as their last album’s opening title track revealed, the axeman sounds remorseful in this comment, and raring to go full throttle ever since.
Truly Ballou’s dextrous, spindly staccato riffs are all over this effort’s opener Slip The Noose, feeling both monolithically speedy and a slow churn all at once, violently colliding or swimming alongside Nate Newton’s thudding bass licks. It achieves that unattainable Converge chemistry: every player doing their acrobatic best and never sounding messy, a skill that’s very much evident on the slip-slide denouement chaos of It’s Not Up To Us. If we ever forgot who helped put the math into mathcore, there’s a head-spinning choppiness to the start of It Only Gets Worse, even before you get to those fill licks, so overwhelming in its final build up that you feel yourself close to self-combustion. The sheer weight of monolithic closer Nothing Is Over gets you there.
All over, there’s the quality of any Ballou-marked production that everything is so clean in the mix despite the instruments sounding formed from rock out of a grimy cavern. Jacob Bannon’s voice in Doom in Bloom has hardly rang clearer (perhaps not hard given the unearthly barks of former days), and the stripped-bare shouty vocal only emphasises the unfaltering authenticity of his strained emotion. Some instances do see Converge on autopilot, as on Ballou’s reductive main riff here—as sly and winking as it is—and Dream Debris is like a near-identical twin to the fabulous Glacial Pace. The title track is the classic sound of them chugging like the most keen runaway steam train, where you can imagine Koller’s trademark grimace behind the kits. You can feel your face doing the same when Ballou lands on his melancholic riff in its midsection though, complete with Newton’s gravelly lead vocal.
That’s certainly the best example of the band’s intentional move toward ‘emotional hardcore’, while some production choices are integral to the album’s central theme of The Hum: a pulsating noise only heard by a tiny percentage of people, with no consensus on its cause. The sounds that begin Detonator and I Won’t Let You are somewhat alien, while the latter’s controlled, squealing feedback is the sort of thing that only gets 2% of the population gee’d up (guilty). The synth on It Used to Matter is a strange sonic detour despite fitting with the album’s artwork over a Swansian warped-blues interlude, which they similarly dabbled with on Love Is Not Enough. Speaking of the artwork, it is a tad like they wanted to make Arctic Monkey’s AM a bit gnarlier. Albeit that’s better than the last’s demon-angel floating through a dust cloud––while characteristically Jacob Bannon’s art, these two are not my personal favourites in his legendary run of Converge sleeves.
It’s easy to see Hum Of Hurt as a string of additional Love Is Not Enough A-sides too great to fit into that small package, reworked into a loosely thematic separate thing. And maybe its partnering album’s ebb and flow is more rewarding––the band being at their very best when granting you some respite after whipping you senseless for a good four songs on the trot. Yet these ten cuts are still evidence of Converge’s coming back very strong, baring their teeth better than pretty much all other heavy music purveyors. Even when there’s little ‘newness’ to their 2026 output (so far), it does not matter. This brand of feral, cathartic release can never be made by anyone else.
For fans of: Botch, Norma Jean, Poison The Well
‘Hum Of Hurt’ by Converge is released on 5th June on Epitaph Records.
Words by Elliot Burr
