Converge – Love Is Not Enough: Album Review

Live4ever 12 February, 2026

Artwork for the Converge album Love Is Not Enough

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Converge’s philosophizing closer leaves the deepest impression, chiselled from the absurdity of offering grief rather than love at a funeral.

The blurb that accompanies Love Is Not Enough has one killer line that stands out as a metaphor both for the record and Converge’s existence.

In seeking to describe the ten song, thirty-minute salvo of Converge’s eleventh album of a career stretching back thirty-five years, the author just leads with the pithy but arrow accurate: “There isn’t an ounce of fat.”

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That may also seem a strange thing to say, but the band themselves are keen to double down on it, vocalist Jacob Bannon tying it off with: “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.”

For Bannon and his fellow Converge members Kurt Ballou (guitar), Nate Newton (bass) and Ben Koller (drums), the idea of somehow polishing their sound – which for the uninitiated blends many different flavours of metal with punk, screamo, hardcore and anything else they fancy – is anathema.

Having formed in Massachusetts in the mid-90s, they equally refuse to be defined by the neo-classic status afforded to 2001’s Jane Doe, or give any head to the machismo that permeates the male dominated, extreme noise fringes of the various movements they live in.

The title Love Is Not Enough sums up where Bannon feels many of us are, struggling to find the empathy and personal energy to live beyond insulating ourselves from fear or harm.

To express this without anger is difficult in any medium, but the titular opener isn’t willing to concede an inch, a thrash tempo blast of metal overload with a stark message for the conceited: “We must grow to stomach the taste of our own blood/We have to accept that love is not enough.”

In times of extreme stress we also have to know our limitations; the intensity of Bad Faith stems from Bannon witnessing a friend going through a personal crisis he could do more than powerlessly observe.

This pent-up frustration threatens to overwhelm even the bludgeoned spat out riffs, eating reason and memory.

If everything was the equivalent of a being dragged face down along a footpath (in, it must be stressed, a good way), eventually fatigue would set in.

Here the firebreak is provided by the gothic instrumental Beyond Repair, whilst the blackened and twisted Amon Amok sends its curses outwards with dark intent.

To shift between the running slots here feels like heresy, especially as Bannon has revealed the album’s conscious design: “It does a thing that no other Converge record does – it keeps ramping up”.

Like ounces of fat, that mounting of intent is however in the ear of the beholder, as Distract And Divide’s 90 seconds of blast beats and indecipherable angst grab by the throat before To Feel Something’s scraped metalcore takes any sense of emotional control to its inevitable breaking point.

How does this screw turn? Not by manifesting itself in lost control or spiralling downward if the punk-ingrained and relatively straight-shooting penultimate track Make Me Forget You is any mark.

It’s the philosophizing closer We Were Never The Same that leaves the deepest impression. Chiselled lyrically from the absurdity of offering grief rather than love at a funeral, its furiously elevating phases draw things to a close with a frightening economy of purpose.

Perhaps this is what lacking fat means. Or maybe it’s a refusal to compromise that’s always been a hallmark of what Converge does.

Either way, Love Is Not Enough’s gristle makes for hard lessons and harder noise.

Andy Peterson

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Tags:andy peterson, converge