Converge have been making hardcore records for over thirty years, and Love Is Not Enough, released in February, is their most emotionally direct statement yet. That’s not a compliment offered lightly. For a band that built its reputation on albums like Jane Doe and Axe to Fall, records that weaponized anguish into something technically ferocious, “emotionally direct” could easily read as code for “less interesting.” It isn’t.

What Love Is Not Enough actually does is strip back some of the density and let the songs breathe just enough to cut deeper. Jacob Bannon still screams like he’s trying to outrun something, but the arrangements give those screams room to land. The rhythm section of Nate Newton and Ben Koller has always been the structural engine of this band, and here they’re doing something slightly different, finding pockets of space inside the chaos that the older records wouldn’t have allowed.

The album follows a string of high-profile collaborative records, including their work with Chelsea Wolfe and Cave In, that showed the band stretching into more atmospheric territory. Love Is Not Enough pulls back from that and reasserts the band’s core identity while still sounding like the product of musicians who have been listening carefully to everything they’ve tried.

There are moments here that will surprise people who assume they know what a Converge record sounds like. That’s not a new trick for them, but the execution feels particularly assured. When the record gets quiet, and it does get quiet, the effect is more destabilizing than the loud parts.

Lyrically, Bannon is doing what he’s always done, writing with a kind of compressed fury about damage and survival and the difficulty of staying intact, but with something that sounds like hard-won acceptance sitting underneath it. “Love is not enough” as a statement reads bleak on the surface. In context, it reads more like honesty. It is not enough, and yet here we are, making records about it anyway.

This is a band that has earned the right to make exactly the album they want to make. Love Is Not Enough sounds like a band that knows that, and isn’t taking it for granted.