Footage of Converge playing an as-yet-unreleased song has made it online.
The pioneering Massachusetts metalcore band, who’ve recently been recording their next studio album, debuted two new tracks for their spring North American tour earlier this month, printed on setlists as WWNTS and Doom In Bloom.
Watch video of the four-piece playing WWNTS (presumed to stand for one of the lyrics, “we were never the same”) at a show in Detroit on May 10 below.
Converge’s last album, The Dusk In Us, came out in 2017. In 2021, the band teamed with singer/songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, her collaborator Ben Chisholm and their former bassist Stephen Brodsky (now of Cave In) to release the collaborative piece Bloodmoon: I.
The band have been working on new music since last year. During the summer, drummer Ben Koller took to X (formerly Twitter) and hinted towards what fans can expect.
“There is A LOT of new [Converge] material,” he wrote. “I feel like I’m at Old Country metalcore Buffet and all the foods are RIFFS.”
He added in a reply: “It’s all over the place. We have crowdkilling, Fugazi, Mars Volta, Entombed, mathcore madness, slow Nate [Newton, bass] riffs where I play too fast, shitty riffs, emo riffs… This could be our best album yet no joke. We should proably [sic] ditch the shitty riffs though.”
Koller also called Converge’s new songs the “most evolved, natural and fully realised bunch of material we have ever written”.
The band returned to the studio earlier this year, with vocalist Jacob Bannon releasing updates during recording via Substack. The tracking took place at GodCity Studios in Salem, Massachusetts, owned by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou.
Ballou has produced every Converge album since 2001 and has also worked with The Armed, Russian Circles, Zeal & Ardor, Gatecreeper, High On Fire, Code Orange and others.
Converge’s North American run wrapped up on May 15 and the band will return to the road for four more shows in July. they also have a set at Furnace Fest in Birmingham, Alabama booked for October 5.
