Five years of quiet, four new fathers, eighteen songs on tape and thirteen on the record. That is the arithmetic behind The Dusk in Us, and you can hear every number in it. The Salem quartet that spent the better part of three decades turning hardcore into a demolition trade came back on 3 November 2017, through Epitaph and Deathwish Inc., with a record about holding something small and breakable while the world outside keeps catching fire. It can still rip the ceiling tiles out of a VFW hall. It just picks its moments.
Recorded in the spring of 2017 at GodCity, Kurt Ballou's own studio in Salem, Massachusetts, right after a tour wound down on 8 April, and produced, engineered and mixed by Ballou on the same equipment setup he had used for You Fail Me in 2004, the ninth Converge studio album landed five years after All We Love We Leave Behind with the same four men on it. Nobody left. Everybody had kids. "We've all had children, several children in some cases, since our last album," Ballou told Mixdown on 15 November 2017, and that sentence is the engine under the hood.
Which brings you to "A Single Tear", the opener and the song about becoming a parent. It is a smoke alarm screwed to the ceiling over the crib: loud because it loves you, wired to scream before anything else in the house knows there is a fire. Jacob Bannon still screams, but his words actually reach you, and Nate Newton's bass answers him from under the floorboards. Four minutes. No warm-up.
It is a smoke alarm screwed to the ceiling over the crib: loud because it loves you, wired to scream before anything else in the house knows there is a fire.
I have watched plenty of bands come back from five years off with the edges sanded down. Converge came back with the edges on. Ballou did not stack the guitars into a wall this time; he left them warm, dry and close, like amps in a rehearsal room with the door shut, so Ben Koller's off-kilter accents and Newton's bass get the space they usually have to fight for. On a Converge album, being able to follow the lyrics is news.
The fast songs are still a crime scene. "Under Duress" lands like a brick through a windshield, riffs and snare hits left sticking out of the frame at angles nobody planned. "Arkhipov Calm" is the band's spastic, math-wired side at full lean. "Broken by Light" and "Cannibals" are both under two minutes, and they tear through the room as if the 1990s never ended. "I Can Tell You About Pain", the seven inch that broke the silence on 25 July 2017, closes on a breakdown that drops like a cinder block off a loading dock.
The slow half is where the record earns its keep. "The Dusk in Us" runs past seven minutes, opens on clean guitar and a quieter Bannon, and spends most of its length climbing toward a final swell of distortion that comes over you like a tide over a sea wall. It is the emotional centre of the album and the best song on it. "Trigger" rides Newton's bass into grimy noise rock. "Thousands of Miles Between Us" takes almost five minutes to build, slow and dark, before it finally lets go.
Here is the catch, and the band said it out loud themselves. "We all disagreed about what the strongest songs were," Ballou told Exclaim! on 6 November 2017. "It was a compromise." You can hear the compromise. The fury spends long stretches on a leash, the chaos is tidier than the band that made Jane Doe ever allowed, and the closing slot goes to "Reptilian", a solid, headbanging metal song, when "Thousands of Miles Between Us" was sitting right there with the lights already going down. End on the long dark one and the record leaves on its own terms. End on "Reptilian" and it just stops.
This is a band with everything to protect, still swinging hard. It went to No. 60 on the Billboard 200, higher than any Converge album before it, without one cheap hook to get there. It is not the wild record. It is the grown one, with the wild record still alive inside its fast songs, and the title track alone earns it a place on the shelf of the hardcore kid who grew up and learned that the loudest alarm you will ever own is the one you install for somebody else.