After causing a sensation earlier this year, Converge is already back with a new album…
Titled Hum of Hurt, it arrives less than six months after Love Is Not Enough, making it the twelfth album from the band led by Jacob Bannon (vocals/bass), Kurt Ballou (guitar/backing vocals/bass), Nate Newton (bass/backing vocals/guitar), and Ben Koller (drums).
The band kicks things off at a brisk pace with the explosive Slip the Noose, a fairly short track that showcases all the madness but also the complexity the band can bring to life in their riffs, not hesitating to draw on chaotic and violent structures. Bannon’s screams are as expressive as ever, just as on Doom In Bloom, where they’re much more plaintive yet intensely powerful, allowing the tortured rhythm section to strike with a wild groove, then finally with a more joyful and energetic touch on the final. The rage returns on It Only Gets Worse, where the vindictive Hardcore roots are pushed to the extreme, letting the band fully unleash themselves while Kurt’s guitar remains as dissonant as ever, unleashing waves of almost unsettling harmonics. A few backing vocals round out the explosion before Detonator, which grants us a brief “respite” before picking up again at a relatively moderate pace, yet retaining the jagged, abrasive sound as the riffs flare up fairly regularly until reaching I Won’t Let You Go. Given the title, you might have expected a laid-back track, but Converge has, of course, had a major surprise in store for us with one of the album’s most energetic rhythms, driving the message home with waves of fury before plunging back into madness for It’s Not Up To Us, a track whose despair rings with stark truth. The track is short too, but it allows for moments of pause to create tension and thus accentuate the more intense sections before handing the baton to Dream Debris, which, being much longer, offers a veritable cacophony of percussion as an introduction. The bass takes over for a long stretch, then the other instruments appear, followed by the vocals, but the tone remains quite heavy, even when the screams resurface; however, the finale changes everything and makes us want to break our necks before picking up much more gently on It Used To Matter, where the sound slowly lulls us. There are a few disruptions from the initial percussion, but the mix remains ethereal until Hum Of Hurt, the title track where violence and chaos resurface, along with those raw, impactful, and penetrating vocal parts, sometimes even a far cry from the vocalist’s usual screams. It’s hard not to sense an almost intimate quality in this track, which leads into Nothing Is Over, the closing track steeped in a sense of oppression, yet also featuring more distant, almost faint sounds that contrast with the explosive bursts the band masters so masterfully to bring the album to a close.
While Converge delighted their fans with a new album, this second one, though more experimental, will have much the same effect! It’s always just as impressive to see how well the band masters their craft, and all the more so a second time in such a short span on Hum of Hurt…
90/100
