All We Love We Leave Behind (Deluxe Edition)

Having formed during the winter of 1990, Boston quartet Converge is considered pioneers of metalcore. Their eighth studio album finds them reclaiming their sound — the preceding *Axe to Fall* was riddled with more guest musicians than a hip-hop album. Opening cut “Aimless Arrow” makes good on its name by throwing fans a curveball with Jacob Bannon trying his hand (or larynx, rather) at melody. But the following “Trespasses” returns the mentally disturbed frontman to his throat-ripping howls and growls with a feral abandon. But things get really interesting with “Sadness Comes Home,” a shape-shifting sock in the clock that opens with a Sabbathesque sludge before erupting like a sonic volcano of hyper-fast fretboard shredding and propulsive, explosive drumming that feel like a thousand fists punching one face. Over this Bannon channels all his inner demons into one ferocious beast doing battle with his own soundtrack. At under two minutes, “Vicious Muse” plays like a stormy tantrum tailor-made for the mosh pit. Conversely, “Coral Blue” stretches out almost five minutes of sludge-infused aural brutality.

The Boston hardcore band Converge are nearing the 25-year mark, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into it their excellent eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clearer: You don't just show up and write songs like this.

At this point in its 22-year existence, Converge resembles a mass of scar tissue as much as a band. Throughout the ’90s, the hardcore outfit gradually, inexorably grew into its primal yet intricate sound—only to lance and cauterize it with 2001’s Jane Doe, one of the millennium’s most searing acts of musical…

With so much made of “tricky” second and third albums, not many platitudes exist to explain the challenge faced by those bands with the gumption to last to their 8th full-lengther. If Converge are anything to go by, however, apparently it gets easy after number three. Since nailing their formula on 2001's ground-breaking Jane Doe, there has scarcely been a more prolific heavy band in history.

Converge - All We Love We Leave Behind review: The kings of hardcore have returned to provide another brutal beatdown on all of their willing victims.