Converge - Love Is Not Enough Converge

Love is Not Enough might be the apotheosis of Converge’s decades-long journey through the punk, hardcore and metal microcosm. What they have created is a strident artistic statement on the turmoil of living that hones their collective strengths to a razor’s edge.

There isn’t an ounce of fat. Every song moves with a power and purpose that eclipses their human origins, that speaks to the anger, pain, and frustration of the modern age. From the opening fusillade of the title track to the closing hurricane of “We Were Never the Same,” Love is Not Enough is a sonorous balance of vitality and viciousness that reflects the chaos and uncertainty of the times we live in.

“There’s always obstacles in the world,” Bannon says. “Personal, professional, economical, whatever. But I feel like we’re in a pressure cooker somewhere on our evolutionary line. It’s a lot just to be a human being in the modern world, trying to function, maintain, grow, have empathy, have compassion. It takes more than it used to, to do all those things.”

The album title itself says everything about the trials of today. “The line ‘Love is not enough’ is something I had kicking around for a while,” Bannon says. “Some of the things I wrote at the time were from a human resilience perspective, an acceptance of the brutality and unforgiving nature of the world. I was reflecting on that in poetic form and set it aside. When we got into the studio, it all fit together.”

Unlike so many albums that adhere to a time-honored sequencing format, cherry-picking favored tracks for the all-important first, second, and final spots, Love is Not Enough is all about momentum. “It does a thing that no other Converge record does—it keeps ramping up,” Bannon says. “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.”