Hardcore veterans Converge wage war on complacency and deliver a visceral, unrelenting masterpiece on their eleventh album Love Is Not Enough.
Words by Felix Bartlett | Feb 19, 2026
It’s been nine years since a proper Converge record. Nine years. That’s long enough to finish a PhD, have a small child learn to walk and talk, or for the rest of metalcore to spend an entire era desperately trying to fill the void these four guys left behind. Spoiler: nobody managed it.
Love Is Not Enough arrives with the kind of quiet confidence only a band who genuinely don’t need to prove anything can pull off, and then proceeds to absolutely obliterate you anyway.
The opening title track wastes approximately zero seconds getting to the point. Jacob Bannon sounds like a man who has been storing up nine years of fury in a thermos and is now pouring it, scalding hot, directly into your face. It’s glorious. Distract And Divide follows it up with a grindcore gut-punch that’ll have your neighbours filing noise complaints before the chorus even kicks in, and honestly, they’d be right to.
What makes this record special though isn’t just the rage, it’s the range. Force Meets Presence has this swaggering, almost cocky energy that briefly sounds like it’s about to detour into classic Metallica territory before Converge remember they’re Converge and do something far more interesting with it. Gilded Cage grinds along on Nate Newton’s bass like a late-night drive through somewhere you probably shouldn’t be. And Make Me Forget You is the kind of emotional hardcore that’ll creep up on you at 2am when you’re most vulnerable. Consider yourself warned.
The album does have a dual personality. The first half is all teeth and fury, the second gets more introspective and brooding, like the band clocked off from setting things on fire and sat down to actually think about why they were doing it in the first place. Bannon’s lyrics walk this line between big-picture disillusionment and deeply personal mortality reckoning, which sounds heavy on paper but in practice just makes everything hit harder. The man wrote an album closer in a funeral home car park, and it shows. In the best possible way.
If the 2021 Chelsea Wolfe collaboration left you craving the Converge who’d grab you by the collar and shake you until your teeth rattled, this is your answer. Love Is Not Enough isn’t a comeback because they never really went anywhere. It’s more like a reminder. A very loud, very urgent, extremely welcome reminder that there’s still a band out there operating at a level nobody else has figured out how to reach.
Thirty-six years in and they’re still the ones setting the benchmark. Everyone else is still catching up.
For fans of: The Dillinger Escape Plan, Nails, Touche Amore
Verdict: 💀💀💀💀💀
Love Is Not Enough is out now via Epitaph Records
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