Even the heaviest bands tend to mellow out with age, but Converge are built monstrously different. The Salem metalcore legends have been at it for 36 years now, with its four members remaining in tact for a majority of that timeline. And yet, it’s astounding to hear them 10 albums into the career still operating at an energy level of intensity that feels infinite. Perhaps it’s the required amount of resistance demanded of these times that gives them that immortal halo of fire on their latest full-length, Love Is Not Enough.

For an album that centers itself so much around loss and the inevitable of it, vocalist Jacob Bannon, guitarist and producer Kurt Ballou, bassist Nate Newton, and drummer Ben Koehler are undeterred by these realities, instead opting to bring you within inches of your life to confront it. The head charge into their abyss of deep, dark profound thoughts existential is blazed through a path of fast fury: ultra heavy hardcore serrations cauterize what threatens to cut off the blood supply while speed-driven metal blade guitars tear through anything standing in their way. Blistered eruptions in rhythm rarely stew too long in one place and eluding destruction, because they are the embodiment of destruction.

In a way, it’s a fitting psuedo bookend to a trilogy that began with 2012’s All We Love We Leave Behind and 2017’s The Dusk in Us where the band confronted these bouldering moments of grief in a way that forced their sound to peer deeper inward through post-metal sludge and psychedelic brutality. With Love Is Not Enough, they’ve spent enough time gazing into the abyss and are ready to go to war with it even if their brazen rejection of it is what ultimately kills them.

Highlights: “Bad Faith”, “To Feel Something”, “We Were Never the Same”

Converge’s Love Is Not Enough is available now on Deathwish Inc. / Epitaph Records.

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