Every time Jacob Bannon opens his mouth to scream, he swears a contract with himself: endure. Converge stand as the living evidence of what that promise demands.
For more than 35 years, the Salem, Massachusetts, band have served as both anchor and accelerant in the sprawling universe of extreme and heavy music, a gravitational force around which entire subgenres orbit. Since forming at the tail end of the Eighties, Converge have evolved from scrappy hardcore upstarts into one of the most inventive and essential acts in modern metal. They’ve released bona fide genre classics — most notably 2001’s Jane Doe, a game-changer that redefined the boundaries of metalcore — and their influence continues to ripple through today’s scene, shaping bands from Knocked Loose and Architects to Vein.fm and beyond.
Between albums, Converge defy inertia. Guitarist Kurt Ballou runs GodCity Studio, one of the most revered recording studios in rock, and Bannon — also a prolific visual artist — co-runs Deathwish Inc., the label that’s long tested the borders of heaviness. Over the years, bassist Nate Newton has channeled his extra energy into projects such as Old Man Gloom, Doomriders and Cave In, while drummer Ben Koller has stayed busy in All Pigs Must Die, Mutoid Man and the supergroup Killer Be Killed.
Their world is one of complete self-sufficiency, a small ecosystem built from trust and perseverance. Converge may be among the most formidable technicians in metal, but unlike bands whose precision feels like cold feats of civic engineering, their music remains raw and bodily in its urgency.
Now, with their 11th album, Love Is Not Enough, on the horizon, Converge endure as modern elders with a defiantly youthful spirit: a testament to what it means to build, adapt and survive. The record — a follow-up to their most experimental outing, 2021’s Bloodmoon: I with Chelsea Wolfe — feels like a distillation of their essence, a deliberate retracing of steps back to the primal confluence of hardcore and metalcore that first defined them. It thrums with the tension of musicians still in pursuit of combustion, still intent on finding something vital at the edge of ruin. It’s the sound of Bannon still discovering new ways to make noise sound human. By his own admission, it’s the heaviest, darkest and most personal record he’s ever made — an exercise in expulsing pain.
He’s speaking to Revolver the day after his 49th birthday, wearing a black jacket and beanie, the chill of the Massachusetts fall pressing in through the window. The light from his computer bounces off his glasses, as he lays out his impending deadlines. Love Is Not Enough will be released jointly on Deathwish Inc. and Epitaph Records — and the latter is expecting him to turn in the album artwork right away. He pats the large pile of sketches and collages that have been accruing for the past five months. Epitaph will have to wait.
Ben Pike
Bannon doesn’t concern himself with the mythology that’s grown around his band for the past three-and-a-half decades. Instead, he keeps his eyes low to the ground, knuckles down, emphasizing that he is fundamentally a working-class musician. For him, the creative life is utilitarian and disciplined.
“If you have a vision, you have to put the time and work towards it,” he says. “I can’t just sit down, create and rely on a happy accident.” His days are regimented: wake at dawn, drop off the kids, run label operations, cook dinner, tend to family, work late into the night. It’s a life of ceaseless tasks, with screaming interspersed — sometimes from him, more often from his kids.
“Because of the way I was raised, I try to be as present for my two young kids as possible,” he says. “I think that’s something that a lot of young parents struggle with — especially at first — because they’re like, Where’s my sense of self? You know, I now have this thing that’s in my life that occupies all space, all time. It’s about finding a balance of those things and, you know, what can work for you.”
Thomas Hooper
He finds that balance by organizing his life into strict compartments, seldom allowing work and family to intersect. That careful separation makes him deliberate, almost mechanistic, in the rituals that shape his art. Two decades ago, he would pour himself into a project until exhaustion emptied him. Now, creation arrives when the responsibilities and pressure of daily life allow it. The fire is still inside, the intensity still growing — only now he’s learned to build in the release valve and choose when to let it out.
The older he gets, the more people ask: “How are you still doing this heavy shit?” Bannon’s answer is simple: how could he not? Each year, pressure piles upon pressure. The world slides further into decay, its own slow self-destruction. “I haven’t felt any dulling as I’ve gotten older,” he says. It’s a fear familiar to many artists rooted in youth culture — that time will blunt their urgency and the voice that once demanded attention will go quiet by 30. “They think they won’t have anything else to say,” Bannon continues. “Believe me, you will. The older we get, the deeper the war.”
Converge has always been a vessel for the personal, built to grow alongside its members — to evolve without losing its core. The war changes shape and mutates, but Bannon remains recognizable. “I’m still very much the same person as I was when we started this stuff,” he says. He’s still a punk railing against authority, but one who strives to be a good human being and treat those around him with patience, compassion and curiosity. Even when his 10-year-old screams at him, he listens, tries to understand the source of the anger, and meets it with empathy.
Thomas Hooper
As Bannon channels the pressures of life into art, the practicalities of doing so remain complicated. Bannon, Ballou and Newton live within 10 minutes of each other. Koller is in Los Angeles. Scheduling time together is tricky. The others can practice wherever they are, but Bannon can’t exactly scream whenever he wants in his family home. And besides, exercising his instrument comes with an added cost. “What I do is inherently damaging,” he says.
Almost every time Bannon screams, he bleeds. Blood and bile rise in his throat, thick and acidic. He often has to apologize to his bandmates for spattering their instruments. Over years of rehearsals, performances and recordings, his body has learned to endure the trauma. Pain has become the throughline of Bannon’s life. His body has learned to anticipate that pain and adapt to it, sustaining the work he refuses to compromise.
Growing up in Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley, Bannon says he had “no aspirations for anything.” Teachers and parents alike told him he’d never amount to much. “My science teacher told me I should pump gas for the rest of my life,” he recalls. At home, his family urged him to stop making art and focus on a “real job.”
With little to look forward to, he became a rough-and-tumble kid collecting injuries from biking and skating. Then, at 15, came his first serious one. The old saying goes: If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you? Bannon did. He leapt from a bridge into a flooded quarry and landed on a discarded shopping cart, shattering his kneecap and severing his patellar tendon. “That hurt,” he says, “a lot.” No kidding.
Pain, he realized, was instructive. He funneled his frustration, anger and energy into music. But he’s never fully healed. It helped him make sense of the hurt, even if it never truly erased it. Today, the remnants linger: dulled scars on his face, a dent in his chin — all from a reckless, fearless adolescence. “I just didn’t care,” he says. “Like, like,” he stammers, “I grew up in a house that was pretty uncomfortable, in hindsight — in a psychological and physical way.” He hints at deeper hardships with his brother, though he won’t elaborate. “I don’t know…” he mutters, as if caught in some internal frenzy. “I have a weird relationship with pain because of that.”
His words scatter as he tries to articulate the way hurt migrates, how what happens to the body rewires the mind. “It just kind of gave me an idea of what real pain was, you know? It wasn’t, I don’t know… not getting something as a kid — but actual physical pain and psychological battles at the same time.” Then he slows, gathering himself, before hitting a crucial memory.
“This is a tough one,” Bannon continues. “There was an incident when I was a kid. I got hit with a baseball bat. That’s the first time I felt in danger. I was completely vulnerable, not able to defend myself. And that definitely shaped some things with me, the way I process pain — even sensation, wanting to be touched, any of that. It’s something I work through now, as an adult, and always have.”
Those early encounters with danger and discomfort gave Bannon the fuel for the scream. The emotional literacy came later — the result of a lifetime spent trying to process that pain and learning how to survive within its controlled-burn extremes.
Jason Zucco
Writers have long reached for the most ballistic language they can muster to describe Bannon’s voice. After collaborating with Converge on Bloodmoon: I, Chelsea Wolfe likened it to “a decaying skull screaming into the void.” Stereogum once called it “open-wound agonies.” That terrible, gnashing, brilliant sound tearing out of his throat feels like something you’d only hear from a person in the most unbearable pain of their life.
I ask whether the scream he makes in his music resembles the noises he made when he was in pain as a kid. He tells me he doesn’t remember screaming. But the memory of all the air leaving his body has stayed with him. It was the moment he met his survival instinct.
When his kneecap shattered as he landed on the cart in the quarry water, he knew that if he yielded to the pain, he’d drown. His choice was simple: cave to it or swim against it. Instinct took over — the same impulse he says he now channels into music. His interpretation of punk and hardcore has always been that they permit the most unfiltered form of human expression, a space where instinct and endurance override restraint. When he and Ballou formed Converge in the winter of 1989, Bannon hadn’t planned to sing at all. He played bass, content to stand in the back. But when early shows demanded a voice, he stepped forward — almost against his own will. He soon found that he could withstand the current of his own fear.
Ben Pike
At first, he tried to emulate vocalists like Ronnie James Dio, Leeway’s Eddie Sutton and Sheer Terror’s Paul Bearer, learning by tracing the spaces between their voices and his own. He quickly understood that he would never be metal’s Mariah Carey. “I’ve never tried to be,” he says. “I’ve just wanted to express the complex, heightened emotions within me, at volume.”
These days, he often goes silent before a show, conserving what little energy he can for what he’s about to put his body through. He still thinks about something Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed — who he’s known since he was 14 — told him years ago: “Watching you play is like seeing someone try to put their body into the Earth.” That’s exactly it, he says. He’s trying to put his body into the Earth.
That urge to test his limits, to see how much of himself he could give, carried straight into Converge’s earliest recordings. The band’s 1994 debut, Halo in a Haystack, was funded with money Bannon earned working at a nursing home. He took the job during his sophomore year of high school and stayed there for nearly two years, saving what he could. They recorded their first demos at West Sound Studio in New Hampshire. Before that, they’d only experimented with four-tracks in basements and bedrooms. That first taste of a real studio hooked Kurt Ballou — now one of metal’s most esteemed producers — on the craft of recording itself.
At the time, Converge didn’t sound all that different from the other heavy bands trying to braid melody into hardcore. The late Eighties were bleeding into the Nineties, and everything was cross-pollinating. Until then, genres had been rigid, almost tribal. A hardcore band sounded like a hardcore band: four chords, nothing more. Converge would become elemental in shifting that attitude.
Ben Pike
Today, traces of those early hardcore influences remain, flickering inside a polychromatic blur of sounds that, in true Converge fashion, are impossible to entirely pin down, always slipping just out of reach. What’s most remarkable about Love Is Not Enough is that 11 albums into their career, it carries genuine first-album energy. Written during what Bannon calls “a very tumultuous time in the world,” the record was shaped by “huge waves of emotion that never crested.”
You can hear that across the songs. The title track mangles classic metalcore tropes into jagged, mathcore shapes that push the band to their brink. “Distract and Divide” is an anti-tech tirade where Bannon screams into a societal void too complacent to hear him. And on “Make Me Forget You,” he howls “We age faster than I care to admit” over anthemic, needling riffs. As always, much of it is deliberately uncomfortable and challenging to listen to. It is quite possibly the band’s most potent work since 2009’s Axe to Fall.
It’s not just the intensity that hits hardest this time, but the emotional weight behind it. Bannon says there’s an inescapable darkness in Love Is Not Enough. “One day in the studio, I was sitting behind Kurt as he worked on a song idea he was carrying in his head,” he recalls. “After some dry runs, he hit record and went for it, meticulously pulling a sad shadow of a melody out of his guitar. As his last notes decayed to silence, he said, ‘That riff makes me feel terrible about myself.’ It was so dark and intimate. It was hard not to feel how real it was. Music can do that — reveal things about ourselves that are difficult to put into words.”
Middle age, far from dulling the band’s energy, has sharpened it. Between the pressures of parenthood, a demanding label and a world tilting toward chaos, Bannon’s scream now takes on a different shape. Each inhale, exhale and scrape of that ragged throat carries the weight of responsibility. “People say the world’s on fire,” Bannon says, “but the world’s always been on fire.” He softly laughs, before continuing. “We’re feeling pressures from all places in life. We have responsibilities, we have obligations, we have fears, we have strengths, we have weaknesses, and everything currently feels like it’s in a pressure blender, because everything feels like it’s about to explode.”
If there’s any upside to that constant strain, it’s Love Is Not Enough. “There’s an immense amount of pressure,” he continues, “and pressure for us becomes art.”
Ben Pike
The challenge Converge issues is to confront the chaos head-on, to resist numbing out or finding solace in our phones or worse. The call has always been to fight rather than flee. It’s a provocation that’s sustained the band for more than three decades, an unrelenting demand to simply stay awake. With their eyes wide open, Converge have never struggled to find something to scream about.
“Most days I feel like I’m just hanging on,” Bannon admits. “You can hear that in the songs.” Whether that desperation reflects the world or merely mirrors their own inner turbulence, even he isn’t sure. He’s too busy throwing his body into the ground.
“One thing Nate said to me once, when we were talking about making music, was that we just do it right,” Bannon recalls. “We do it how we’d want to see it done as fans. As a listener, I want my artist to be honest and pure, to have faults and strengths, and to give everything they have. That’s us. We’d never put anything out that wasn’t 100 percent of ourselves.”
Part of him still hears the voices of his teachers who told him he’d never amount to anything. “Am I wasting my energy as a person doing this?” he asks himself routinely. Then he reminds himself of the people who surround him now — the artists he’s supported at Deathwish, the bands in the scene with whom he’s found peers and a support base. He’s spent his entire adult life bucking against the authority figures of his childhood. Still, he rails against them.
Love Is Not Enough is Converge’s latest will and testament. The negative voices will always press in. Life will wound. Responsibilities will mount. Yet the screams of catharsis will persist. Bannon’s body, memory and discipline insist upon it. And by extension, so do Converge, their very existence an act perseverance, rigor and human honesty in extremis. To listen to them is to witness the power of a band who convert pain into form — and who, 11 albums in, remind us of what can happen when endurance turns to transformation.