CONVERGE “Hum of Hurt” by J. Bennett
You feel it before you hear it. And once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. A low, persistent noise throbbing in the background. Scientists say it registers between 30 and 40 hertz. It’s been heard in Ipswich, Massachusetts; Auckland, New Zealand; and Windsor, Ontario. It has haunted the population of Taos, New Mexico, for decades. It’s been linked to suicides in the UK. Not everyone can hear it. No one knows where it’s coming from. They call it The Hum.
Converge have taken this mysterious real-world phenomenon and reimagined it as a physical manifestation of human suffering. I read on the phenomena while researching my own tinnitus. Then an idea struck. “What if the Hum is the culmination of all the pain in the world, creating an audible signal across the universe?” vocalist and lyricist Jacob Bannon posits. “Something noticeable to others operating on a similar emotional plane.”
Hum of Hurt follows Love Is Not Enough as Converge’s second full-length release of 2026. Like its predecessor, the album offers a bleak yet empathetic assessment of the human condition and its ongoing deterioration. With this album, the songs are more raw and exposed. “When we came together to write, we ended up with a wealth of material,” Bannon says. “As work progressed we realized we had created two separate albums, and treated them as such.”
Hum of Hurt is distinct from Love Is Not Enough, but just as volatile and potent. “It’s not a sequel,” Bannon explains. “The unifying musical idea early on was, ‘Let’s make a noise rock album.’ But we never really did. The first one wasn’t. This one touches on that spirit, but it’s much more dynamic than that descriptor. To me, it leans more into being an emotional hardcore album, while Love Is Not Enough feels more metal leaning album. In the end, we simply gave creative birth to another Converge record with its own unique identity and character.”
Opener “Slip the Noose” erupts with a furious cannonade from drummer Ben Koller before launching into a short, grinding frenzy that would feel at home on Jane Doe. “Doom in Bloom” is raw and bloody, as guitarist Kurt Ballou’s spiky riffs scrape against Nate Newton’s bass and Koller’s drums. You can practically hear Bannon’s throat tearing apart in every scream. “It’s dark and pointed right at you,” he says. “Lyrically, I’m exploring how my own middle-aged introspection doesn’t always bring a brighter light. I see my own trappings reflected in those around me. Here I am imploring them to slip the noose to see another day.”
“Dream Debris” is a gripping, doomy epic born from a single bass note that builds to a booming crescendo. “It has a lot of twists and turns, yet starts off incredibly simple. The slow build was driven by Nate’s vision and bass tone,” Bannon says. “We kept asking ourselves ‘Does it need anything else?’ In the end, it didn’t. It was just so heavy, encapsulating everything we wanted in the song."
The menacing track “Detonator” delivers a powerful line that will linger: There’s nothing to win if there’s no one to lose. “I go on a bit of a rant here,” Bannon says. “The idea is that when passion withers, the broken and beaten often remain in discomfort. The song ends with the line, ‘Don't be blown apart by your mistakes,’ which sums up the stark mentality on this one.”
The title track stands as one of the most propulsive and emotional songs of their career. Thematically, Bannon examines the price of the lives we pursue. “I’ve given 35 years of my life to creating art and music,” he says. “I appreciate the creative home and support this community has given, yet rarely is space left for anything else. These lyrics are me looking in a mirror, recognizing that I am not the man I want to be. I need change, and still have work to do.”
The album also features a new rendition of “I Won’t Let You Go,” originally recorded for the 2020 video game Cyberpunk 2077. “When we recorded the first version, Ben tracked drums in California and we assembled it here,” Bannon explains. “It was good, but we knew we could do better. This version has everything the previous one was missing. It now feels right.”
Hum of Hurt was recorded and mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City in Salem, Massachusetts, with engineering assistance from Zach Weeks. Bannon and renowned UK artist Thomas Hooper collaborated on the album artwork.
“For the cover, I had a vision of an EKG signal fusing with some kind of volatile seismography. This amalgamation represents the conditions that would theoretically create a ‘Hum.’ Specifically the heart skips beats before dissolving into static. The signal is then interrupted by a seismic event at the center point of the cover. In conversation, I shared some of these ideas with artist Thomas Hooper, who offered to illustrate them using scientific diagrams as a source of inspiration.
I then spent months creating a mixed media piece for the interior,” Bannon says. “The figures represent the five elements of our planet, or ‘Pancha Bhuta’: Prithvi (Earth), Ap (Water), Agni (Fire), Vayu (Air), and Akasha (Aether). I present them in the throws of chaos, as if the elements themselves are entangled in the Hum of Hurt.”
