In true Converge fashion, the Salem metalcore band opens Love Is Not Enough not with silence but with immediate violence. Kurt Ballou’s scrabbling guitar riffs and Ben Koller’s sludgy drum patterns lurch in and out of focus, before the track fully detonates, as frontman Jacob Bannon’s vocals—the aural equivalent of a panicked signal flare—thrash across the mix, barking out the album’s thesis in the second verse: “We must grow to stomach the taste of our own blood/We have to accept that love is not enough.”
Love Is Not Enough is a back-to-basics pivot after 2021’s Bloodmoon: I. That album’s doomy sense of scale is stripped away here in favor of serrated licks, blunt-force rhythms, and songs that land fast, hard, and feel wired to the present moment, refusing easy catharsis in the process. The ominous “Beyond Repair,” for one, builds at a crawl, radiating a menace that suggests whatever’s broken—politically, culturally, or socially—won’t be fixed anytime soon.
There’s plenty of thrashing to go around, especially during the thunderous opening of the aptly named “Force Meets Presence,” yet the speed and density of the music supplant the ornamental sprawl of Bloodmoon: I. The six songs that make up the album’s first section—only one of which passes the three-minute mark—are volatile, their structures jittery and confrontational, though the mixes feel too clean, even bland. Love Is Not Enough is never as wild or raw as 2001’s seminal Jane Doe, and the polish sometimes strips the riffs of their bite, but tracks like “We Were Never the Same” are certainly loud enough to help make up for it.
But Converge still comes off as confident and in complete control throughout the album. “Make Me Forget You,” the band’s most emotionally direct moment since A Dusk in Us’s “A Single Tear,” is both brutal and deeply beautiful, suggesting that even under the weight of relentless despair, our shared humanity is the only thing that keeps us going. In an era where heavy-sounding music often leans on spectacle, Love Is Not Enough is a reminder that precise execution and unflinching honesty are more than enough—and sometimes all we’ve got.
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