Converge – ‘HUM OF HURT’

In 2024, the BBC aired a four-part series called The Listeners. Based on the Jordan Tannahill novel, the drama follows Claire, an English teacher driven to insanity by a continuous and inexplicable ambient sound. While the story is fictional, the phenomenon, known as “the hum”, is well-documented. Instances of citizens being tortured by a low-frequency drone have been noted worldwide. It was heard by Bristolians as early as the 1970s and has since become subject to academic papers and internet conspiracy. It also suggests that drones are forever around us; the whirr or machinery, the murmur of the hum, the sounds of The Velvet Underground.

Converge are unlikely to be the first to be musically inspired by the hum, but their influence is informed less by the hum’s aesthetics than it is by the same bleakness experienced by The Listeners’ Claire. ‘Hum of Hurt’, Converge’s 12th studio album, reimagines the hum as what vocalist Jacob Bannon calls an “audible culmination of all the pain in the world”. The album is therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, a disconsolate one.

The Massachusetts band has no aversion to melancholia. Their last album ‘Love Is Not Enough’ – released only a matter of months prior to ‘Hum of Hurt’ – was a gloomy experience, despite containing an underlying thread of hopefulness. But portents aside, the fact that Converge, a beloved band with over three decades of recording now behind them, has released two albums in the same year is enough to have heavy music fans positively salivating.

Bonus points are also awarded for how vastly different the two albums are. The metal leanings of ‘Love Is Not Enough’ are here substituted for what Bannon calls “emotional hardcore”. His vocals testify to this. In addition to the usual growls and screams, it is the pained yelps of his higher register that dominate. ‘Doom in Bloom’ epitomises this. It’s a riff-based and moodier side to Converge, but one that suits this album’s lyrical pessimism. Bannon ranges from displays of discontent (“Everything’s a shade of red/from the mirror to my hands/Staining everything I touch/as I reach for what is loved”) to outright misanthropy upon the declaration that doom is flowering and despair is all the rage.

The following ‘It Only Gets Worse’ is equally devoid of optimism, as Bannon contemplates “Rising waters/drowning me/slitting my throat/writhing, as blood flows into the sea” – lovely stuff. It’s also a barnstormer, even by Converge’s untamed sonic standards. Where the opening ‘Slip the Noose’ has Converge walking a well-trodden, albeit typically ferocious path, it is the off-kilter jazz-like grooves that give ‘It Only Gets Worse’ a more impressive and altogether audacious swagger.

Like its predecessor, ‘Hum of Hurt’ is a relatively concise album that only narrowly breaches the 30-minute threshold. It’s a good job too, as there’s only so much existential dread one can take. On ‘Detonator’, the titular hum manifests as an amelodic chug that’s tantamount to a funeral march. Above this, Bannon is at his most self-destructive yet; “There is something that I must admit/giving up is starting to make sense”.

The following ‘It’s Not Up To Us’ breaks the grim tension by offering a welcome sense of hopefulness. “There is no end in sight/without the will to fight”, sings Bannon, and fight they do, as frenetic yet controlled drumming abounds. There is also the peculiar addition of guitar squeaks that sound borrowed from the realms of science-fiction. Converge aren’t known for sounding quirky, but it’s an endearing and – by contrast to the album’s wider lyrical themes – not unwelcome addition.

Similarly idiosyncratic is the dilatory riff that underpins ‘Dream Debris’, whose stop-start structure unfortunately does it few favours. It does feature some pleasingly groggy guitar tones and inherits a certain epicness, but at six-minutes in length– roughly 20% of the album – it does momentarily halt momentum.

The impetus nonetheless returns with the fierce title track. Bannon’s throaty roars are defiant on what is the album’s centrepiece. It’s heavy in all the usual ways, but its greatness lies in the band’s songwriting. Beneath the rawness of Converge are compositions that are as well-constructed as any smartly-written pop song. In a genre that relies all too often on brute-force, Converge stand out. Heavy music is rarely written this well.

It is important to state that while ‘Hum of Hurt’ is thematically indebted to humankind’s follies, it is not an indulgent album. As dreary as the music is, it’s never voyeuristic when approaching dark subject matter. It instead earnestly reflects an epoch that is itself maddening. As the finale ‘Nothing Is Over’ splinters to a dizzying conclusion, our maddening times are portrayed by distant voices that are twisted, otherworldly, and not dissimilar to the phenomenon of the hum itself. Like the album at large, it is an all-consuming meditation that Converge have neatly distilled into a half-hour balancing-act; the horrors of civilisation versus a belief that those horrors will one day weaken and ultimately disappear.

BEN WILLIAMS