Converge have announced a new album, Love Is Not Enough, arriving February 13th via Deathwish/Epitaph. The video for the title track can be streamed now.
Frontman Jacob Bannon described Converge’s first proper full-length since 2017 — not counting a collab LP with Chelsea Wolfe in 2021 — as an album that continues to build in momentum. The aforementioned title track and lead single, “Love Is Not Enough,” kicks things off with two-and-a-half-minutes of ferocity, spearheaded by a death metal segment that turns into pit-churning punk rock. If the LP only get more intense from here, it promises to be a slab of sonic brutality.
“It does a thing that no other Converge record does — it keeps ramping up,” Bannon said in a press release. “And that’s definitely by design. Internally, we passed around dozens of ideas for sequencing because everyone interprets music differently and there’s no right way of doing it. When we do that, we always joke that we all have to be equally unhappy. But this is the one that works.”
The singer also pulled back the curtain on the band’s organic recording process and emphasis on capturing unfiltered takes and raw performances, which were recorded by guitarist Kurt Ballou at his God City studio in Salem, Massachusetts (with engineering assistance from Zach Weeks).
“I think that realism is missing from a lot of modern music of any genre, but especially our genre,” Bannon said. “Things either go super raw and almost chaotic to the point where it’s distracting, or bands take the life out of what they’re doing by editing every aspect. Sometimes the perfect take is the one that has some wildness to it. It’s not perfectly executed. There’s a lot of powerful moments on this record and a lot of angry moments. The realism amplifies that.”
Added Bannon, “We still identify this band as the outlet that’s essential to our lives. We give everything we have to it. Being past your average middle age, we’re starting to see deeper than before into a variety of places. And I don’t think that’s specific to us. I think that’s something that’s utterly relatable.”
Below you can stream the video for “Love Is Not Enough” and see the album art and tracklist. Pre-orders are available via this location.
Love Is Not Enough Artwork:
Love Is Not Enough Tracklist:
01. Love Is Not Enough
02. Bad Faith
03. Distract and Divide
04. To Feel Something
05. Beyond Repair
06. Amon Amok
07. Force Meets Presence
08. Gilded Cage
09. Make Me Forget You
10. We Were Never The Same
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