Jacob Bannon does not want to fight anymore—or, at the very least, he doesn’t have time for it. Somewhere near the middle of “Arkhipov Calm,” the most belligerent speedball from Converge’s gripping and oddly comforting ninth album, The Dusk in Us, the preternaturally aggressive singer and screamer waves, of all things, his white flag. “With every barb that you threw, I saw you list to the side,” he howls above drums so powerful and guitars so charged that they suggest an approaching army. “And I won’t sink with you. I have so much more to do.”
The song takes its name and credo from Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer whose vote against firing nuclear weapons from a submarine in 1962 became the historical footnote that prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into a conflagration. Here, that kind of cool head becomes Bannon’s logic—an unapologetic proclamation that he doesn’t have the energy to squander on fussing and fighting. “It’s the fires that we quell that save us from our hells,” he sings, “It’s the wars that we don’t fight that keep love alive.” It’s a necessary call for stability in preposterously uncertain times, rendered with enough might to make you listen.
Bannon—like all of us—hasn’t always been so collected, so reasonable. Sixteen years and five albums ago, Jane Doe staked Converge’s claim as metalcore architects. Bannon’s poetic bile was its keystone. “I think he pulled that trigger to empty that memory/I think he cut out the weight to end the floods of you,” he moaned back then on a record that coped with betrayal through violent reflection and angry demands. Then came 2004’s You Fail Me, 2006’s No Heroes, 2009’s Axe to Fall, and their 2012 opus All We Love We Leave Behind : They all expressed deep senses of regret and loss, of longing and despair. Bannon was the emotional pugilist, the guy who ended a song sarcastically called “Hope Street” with the imprecation that “No one will break your fall.”
But The Dusk in Us turns its back on the battle, or at least on the interpersonal torment that has mostly defined Converge until now. Throughout these 13 songs, many of them the best the band has ever written, they recognize that the real enemies are bigger, the problems more existential. The invocation of nuclear war is telling, but it’s merely a start. Bannon inveighs against police brutality and senseless violence, hereditary madness and original sin, firearm obsession and feudal overreach. He’s moved beyond bickers and betrayals as his reasons for fisticuffs, taking up the issues that threaten not just him but the child or lover he seems to address during “A Single Tear,” the record’s opener and linchpin. He has, he admits, finally found a reason to fight the good fight. “When I held you for the very first time,” he sings clearly and cleanly, making sure we all understand what’s bound to become a tattoo or two, “I knew I had to survive.”
Rather than looking for a fight, Bannon instead suggests a prepared pacifism, a steady strength that wins these wars with attrition. “Don’t need a helmet if I have my heart,” he stammers and slurs at the start of the gnarly “Under Duress,” an earnest middle finger in the eye of his oppressor. He suggests, over and over, that we rise above these foes—with solidarity, with smarts, with the sense that there’s more at stake here than winning little quibbles. “Reptilian,” for instance, commands us to outthink our base animal instincts, to “lose sight of who we are to know what we can be.” He bids farewell to the very temptation of arms, calling a truce and making his commitment clear. “You have to bury the gun to finally make sense of it,” he sings with the album’s best hook. Converge is his standing army, the force around him that makes you take those standing demands seriously.
Now near the end of their third decade, Converge offers a modern elder’s model for upstart bands or, really, anyone at all. The Dusk in Us is Converge’s first record in five years, and every moment feels earned and alive, like the band hit “Record” only when it had something to say. Between records, they helm or contribute to half a dozen other bands; guitarist Kurt Ballou runs one of the most crucial rock studios around, while Bannon helms Deathwish, a label that’s been testing the borders of heaviness for years. At a time when the problems that give Bannon reason to scream seem only to be getting worse, such self-sufficiency represents an inspiring antidote to the imbalances at the core of The Dusk in Us. Bannon implores us to overcome; Converge, by its very existence, shows us how.
And if Bannon’s lyrics reflect a quest for personal growth and self-preservation in a world that feels ever more fractious, Converge has offered a musical roadmap for as much for decades. They’ve constantly refined their core—a jagged mix of hardcore power and death metal kinetics—while spreading and evolving their sound, too. They’ve added ghoulish dirges, scabrous noise-rock, and bona fide pop hooks. All of that is here on The Dusk in Us, from Ballou’s feedback squall throughout “Murk & Marrow” and Nate Newton’s blunderbuss bassline at the center of “Trigger” to Ben Koller’s start-stop-and-sprint drumming during “I Can Tell You About Pain.” As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation.
