Photo by Jason Zucco
Jacob Bannon doesn’t listen back to the new Converge record for a simple reason: it hurts too much. Love Is Not Enough is the eleventh studio album that Bannon has fronted for Converge, the band he founded when he was a teenager in Salem, Massachusetts, alongside guitarist and producer Kurt Ballou. Converge has never been an easy band. They removed the “roll” from rock ‘n’ roll a long time ago, pioneering a metallic hardcore sound that focused on making the “rock” all about angles and sharp edges.
When I speak to Bannon it's late afternoon. He's in his warehouse, where he’s been working since 7am. He’s just about had enough time to go pee. Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label is based there, which he’s run for over twenty-five years. His computer is next to his painting station where he produces artwork for Converge, other artists, and professional clients. He apologises for multi-tasking while we conduct our Zoom call. Not that I can tell – his answers are measured, thoughtful, and he’s happy to push back on some topics and call out my “overthinking” on others.
There’s something about Love Is Not Enough which is intense in a new way, even for Converge. He describes it as a “raw nerve”. It's music created when “the world is on fire, internally and externally”. I agree. I tell him I think it’s a mean-spirited album, one where there’s a remorselessness in the fists-up approach to songs like “Bad Faith” and “Force Meets Presence”. Every song has teeth.
“It’s funny,” he says of the album. “Sometimes I almost feel like it's almost too rabid, thinking about that. But that's the mirror, that's the reflection of the world around us. You know, I'm 49 years old now. I've been doing this band and creating art and music within this community since I was basically becoming a teenager, 12 to 13 years old. I have an 11-year-old now. He's 700 days away from that place where I was: where I felt the need for a jumping-off point in my life to find something substantive that could give me a sense of community and give me a platform to have a voice.”
That escape into the punk and hardcore community followed “a lot of strife in my life and a lot of dysfunction”. He can’t dissociate the music he's made in his adult life from the lens of the 13-year-old Jacob Bannon. He describes it as a type of “Peter Pan syndrome”. He is still as angry as ever, and that anger has evolved and become more complex. His anger keeps him young inside, and so does Converge.
A few times in our conversation Bannon comes back to the metaphor of the mirror. It is used in the lyrics to “Make Me Forget You”, where he writes about looking down rather than straight ahead at his reflection and acknowledging his self-worth. In the song, he can’t see himself, nor articulate what he wants and needs to other people in his orbit, in relationships where second chances struggle to survive.
On Love Is Not Enough, Converge urges us to hold up a mirror to ourselves, to reflect back the good and bad, externalise both, and attempt to extract something positive from the reflection. The title track of Love Is Not Enough has a telling couplet – “Truth is never wrong/time is never right”. It reflects this difficult work of looking in the mirror.
“There's never a right time for anything,” says Bannon. “Especially when it comes to hard subjects.”
The song enjoins us to delve into what’s bothering us, what the lyric describes as “the taste of our own blood”. More often than not, we don’t deal with things, instead making ourselves comfortable with the uncomfortable, which Bannon has issues with: “We do ourselves a disservice by doing that at times in our lives.”
The album’s title is hard to stomach. It’s a provocation that dares us to face up to its conceit. Surely love is enough?
On Halloween 2017, Converge released “A Single Tear”, the fourth single and opening track from their album The Dusk In Us. It remains a remarkable song, a pile-driving yet ecstatic paean to the awakening Bannon had holding his newborn son in his arms. He went from a state of being “fearful of the substantive”, as the song puts it, to “really be someone who could be loved”. Onstage, he has introduced it as a song about “finding your purpose”.
The title of the new album reminded me of a line from Every Time I Die song “Petal”, released in 2016. That song saw ETID singer Keith Buckley wrangling with the emotional fall-out of his daughter's difficult birth and “the longest winter” which saw his young family rebounding “from hospital to hospital”. It’s a masterpiece of calamity, with a breakdown in which he screams, “I better warm up my gun in case love is not enough”.
I tell Bannon about this resonance with Converge’s album title. He has a long history with ETID, designing their logo and 2003’s Hot Damn! album cover. Converge was about to announce a tour with ETID when the latter broke up in January 2022. Bannon notes how his and Buckley’s contrasting experiences of childbirth brought them both to “a similar poetic place” in their songs. But whereas ETID's sentiment was conditional, Converge is now firmly telling us that love is not enough on an album that feels like a wound, the heart of which is the desolate instrumental, “Beyond Repair”.
And that’s the point.
“I know we've released music from this record so far,” says Bannon. “But there's other songs that, to me, are very intense to listen to, and I don't feel great about listening back. And to me that’s what makes it successful art. It's not meant to be comfortable, but it's meant to be expressive and honest and pure. It's meant to be pure in the vision that I'm offering to the world of my reflections on life and the world around me. And it's… yeah, it's fucking dark.”
Love Is Not Enough is a concise album. Each song inhabits its own musical space, with little bleed over. Bannon runs the emotional gamut: from pleading (“I just wanted to feel…” – “Feel Something”) to defiance (“My acceptance is not defeat” – “Gilded Cage”). The album’s standout is “Amon Amok” with Bannon, Ballou, bassist Nate Newton and tentacular drummer Ben Koller tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe, recalling other sky-scraping centrepieces of theirs, such as “Worms Will Feed / Rats Will Feast” from 2009’s Axe To Fall and “Empty On The Inside” from 2012’s All We Love We Leave Behind.
The song’s lyric presents an uncomfortable duality which might explain the pain that runs through it: “our sun won’t shine/unless we begin/to twist the knife”. Through the pain, it implores us to “Be your own light when there is none”. Acceptance and self-reliance seem to be the way through, however hard they are to achieve.
Sometimes, though, the world keeps getting in, which is the subject matter of the splenetic “Distract & Divide”. The divided self becomes a contested space for those internal and external struggles.
“You can't control when the outside world starts to creep in,” says Bannon. “Not everything is going to be a struggle that is unique to you, personal to you, within your life, right? There are things that are going to be: social, economic things, psychological things, political things. There's a wide variety of places where those things almost start to seep into your life like smoke coming under a door.”
Bannon has never considered Converge a political hardcore band. But he clearly has felt pushed into taking a position of sorts.
“I'm not a person that will ever cast judgment or tell people how they should think or who they should listen to, or who their leaders should be, all those things,” Bannon continues. “Those are personal decisions. Those aren't things that I'm here to soapbox for. But when I do see certain things affecting the outside world, and then I start to see those same things popping up within the confines of my life, it's then it becomes a thing that I feel motivated to write about. For a long time I tried to keep things pretty free from that sort of stuff [...] It's almost like bringing unification to the dysfunction of the society that we live in today. Like saying, look at this unthinkable shell game that's been going on for generations and generations and generations – hundreds of years.”
The winged figure on the album’s cover art is deliberately ambiguous. Its back is turned as it seems to observe our world. Is that a torch in its hand? Is it extinguished? It came together after some birds took up residence in Bannon’s warehouse and their falling feathers began to merge themselves with the other motifs in the 20-30 background art pieces Bannon was developing. Also included were fragments of the spherical object that Converge loosely uses as a symbol, based on a medical device to find imperfections in someone’s eyesight.
Bannon found trying to unify the “emotional weight” of the music the four members of Converge had put down, into one single piece of art, arduous and isolating. But soon themes and meanings began to emerge, one being the gift of flight. The other was this dispassionate angelic, maybe even Luciferian, cover figure. Its presence was emotionally inscrutable, which seemed to fit the album.
“Is this angelic figure watching the earth undo itself? Or is it the cause? Or is it here to finish the job?” Bannon asks.
2026 also sees the 25th anniversary of genre classic Jane Doe. Released a week after Slipknot’s Iowa and on the same day as System of a Down’s Toxicity, Bannon remembers what an awkward child it was at the time. In his words, it was largely perceived as a “fucking bunch of trash noise”. Converge’s PR team at the time shared a pack of the album's reviews and he recalls about “70 per cent” of them being bad.
Bannon appreciates the reverence Jane Doe now receives as part of the history of hardcore and metallic hardcore, “but to me, it's another collection of songs about my life at that time, so I have a hard time seeing past that.”
“I can't look back and be like, that's our South of Heaven, or that's our Reign in Blood, or that's our fucking whatever in those term,” he adds. “Because every record that we do is our Reign in Blood. Every record that we do is our South of Heaven.”
Bannon's not above doing things around Jane Doe this anniversary year if the demand is there. If fans give Converge time and energy, the band has a track record of giving it back. But he’s gunning hard for Love Is Not Enough: “It's probably more valid and has more substantive teeth overall than probably the Jane album does, to be honest. And I think that every record that we've done since then has sort of followed – they follow that line, because if we weren't doing that, we would be doing ourselves a disservice. We wouldn't be making honest music.”
For what it’s worth, Love Is Not Enough is one of Converge’s finest albums. I can't say whether Bannon thinks it was worth the pain he extracted from himself to record it. But I’m also certain he doesn’t care much about my critical judgement anyway.
“I can't give any weight to outside forces when it comes to my art and music,” he says with finality. “I need to be the judge, jury and executioner. It starts and stops with us.”
-----
Love Is Not Enough, the new album from Converge is due February 13th via Deathwish Inc and Epitaph Records. Order the album - HERE
Additionally, Converge has recently been confirmed as the primary support for Poison the Well's spring headlining tour. The trek begins April 2nd in Cleveland, OH and wraps May 17th in San Fransisco, with added support from Balmora and Spy for the first half of the tour and The Armed and The Barbarians of California for the second half.
A complete list of dates and cities can be found below. Tickets can be purchased - HERE
