“We wanted to do something completely different than Bloodmoon”, says Converge’s Kurt Ballou. And so, they did: After more than 35 years together, the band is back with their ferocious album Love Is Not Enough. Guitarist, engineer and producer Ballou spoke with us about the process, the mindset and the ideas that shaped the new release.
A new Converge album is never easy to digest: Depression and anxiety are always just an arm’s length away here, at best. It’s been that way since their 1994 debut Halo In A Haystack, throughout the success of their 2001 metalcore classic Jane Doe, and it doesn’t change 35 years into their career. Converge’s new album Love Is Not Enough is proof that time doesn’t heal all wounds; that life doesn’t get easier just because you grow older – if anything, it gets more complex. The album is a blistering declaration of the lovelessness in our lives, a lovelessness that transcends the boundaries of the personal, the public and the political. It’s a testament of a society that is digitally connected like never before and at the same time drowning in isolation and loneliness; a document of the lack of solidarity, affirmative action and loving care in our communities – wrapped in songs that oscillate between dizzying sonic chaos and grueling heavy grooves. Because the horrors may persist, but so does Converge’s intense musical pushback.
To celebrate the release of their eleventh studio album, we linked up with Converge’s guitarist, engineer and producer Kurt Ballou to talk about change and consistency, the value of collaboration and the authenticity of imperfection.
Kurt, when and how did this album start to take shape? Is that something that only happens when all of you get together?
I think the next album always starts shortly after the previous one is done. It just takes a while to amass the material that we feel we need to be ready to record. I don’t like to work remotely very much. There’s a sweet spot for writing songs for us where everybody needs to show up to practice, prepared with some ideas, but also for those ideas to not be too complete, because we do write everything collaboratively. If I come into band practice with a complete song and just try to show everybody their parts, they don’t usually like it as much. Either the song’s not as good as it can be or the people don’t take ownership of the material because they haven’t had an opportunity to collaborate. So, if I have a few ideas that I think might go together and bring those to practice to see what everybody else thinks and then try to work on them from there together, I find that to be the most effective way to write songs that we’re all happy with. By the time a song is completed, it’s changed so many ways and times that I don’t think we would be able to quantify any song being written by one member. By the time a song is done, it really belongs to all of us, and not just the person who came in with the original idea.
Speaking on this topic of collaboration, your last release before this was the Bloodmoon record, which was the most collaborative effort you ever put out as a band – you had several guitarists, vocalists, songwriters and producers on this project. Did that influence your work on Love Is Not Enough?
I think it created a clear understanding of what a Bloodmoon-type song is and what a Converge-type song is. We’re always looking for unique and differing experiences, whether it’s in songwriting and recording or in touring. So, after doing an album that was incredibly collaborative, it only made sense for us to follow that with something very different. Not because we didn’t like the collaborative process and not because we don’t love the Bloodmoon album, but we just wanted to do something completely different than that. Whatever we do after this will probably be different as well. Having an opportunity to have new musical experiences is great and I love that we are a band that is malleable enough that we can do all these different things and that a good portion of our audience will go with us. I think the first Bloodmoon show was in a beautiful, seated theater with religious type of imagery on the walls. The previous show that we had played as Converge was an afternoon outside in the street in Austin, Texas, with the sun beating down on us and hundreds of shirtless people. There was not even a stage to dive off of, no PA system, Jake was singing through some guitar amp. And then the following show, we’re playing using in-ear monitors and backing tracks. I love the fact that we’re not stuck being just one thing.
“A lot of times in the past, we’ve put too many songs on an album.”
What were your personal goals for this new album?
It was pretty important to me that we not give our audience the same thing as Bloodmoon. It had to be the opposite side of the coin, and it also needed to be something that could be digested as one piece. I think a lot of times in the past, we’ve put too many songs on an album, or the albums have been too long. I always try to approach my band with the mindset of ‘What would I want this to be if I were a fan of this band? What would I want if I were not in Converge?’ As a music listener, it’s really hard for me to absorb a 45- or 50-minute album, especially for music that’s really aggressive and sonically dense. It’s just too long. So, it was important to me that we look to, say, Slayer’s Reign In Blood. That record is 28 minutes, and it’s perfect. This new one is 32 minutes, which makes it a short Converge album, but it also makes it one that can be listened to in one sitting without getting bored. At least I hope so.
Do you still get inspired by others, or is Converge a self-contained universe where anything else going on doesn’t really matter at this point?
Yes, to both of those questions. Our biggest influences at this point are not coming in when we’re writing songs. We’re not being directly influenced by new music. I think we’re being influenced mostly by our history of working together as we write new songs. But we are certainly fans of music, both new and old, and that has an influence on what we do. When we see a great band live, trying to bring the feeling of that to our music is always inspirational. And sometimes, we see shit that sucks and it inspires us to be like, ‘These people made some choices that we wouldn’t make. Let’s make sure that we don’t fall into those pitfalls.’
In your latest Audiotree session, you speak about consistency. How does that relate to being adventurous when creating? Does one happen at the expense of the other?
That’s something that we think a lot about. I think some of that stuff works itself out automatically, just based on the skills and taste of the people in the band, and what common ground we have musically. There’s only so far that we can go. One way we force some adventurousness is through collaborations – or not collaborating. With the Bloodmoon record, we brought in three other musicians to the band, and that forced a paradigm shift. Everybody was willing to let go of some of their usual means of working in favor of playing nice with others. I think when you’re in a new relationship, whether it’s romantic or musical, people are on their best behavior and more likely to be accommodating of others. There was much less stubbornness about ideas. Jake wasn’t the only person writing lyrics, everybody was writing songs, I think there are songs that I didn’t even really play guitar on. It was fun to do that, but then on this new album, we were sort of insistent on not having any collaborators and figuring stuff out on our own.
“The more extreme the music is, the less extreme the production needs to be.”
When it comes to experimentation, there’s also the dimension of technological progress for you as a recording engineer. When you work with Converge, are you interested in toying around with new stuff, or do you just want to stick to the basics?
When you’re really excited about recording, you will read stuff your favorite artists did on a certain song – all kinds of crazy recording techniques, like Sylvia Massy recording guitar through a hot dog instead of a distortion pedal. Shawn Everett or Tchad Blake have all these really extreme recording techniques that sound fun and impart a lot of character on the recording. I do love that idea, but unfortunately, when it comes to recording bands like Converge, there’s so much sonic density just coming from the band itself that there’s not really any room to build a lot of character with the recording. People try recording drums with a microphone through a vacuum cleaner hose wrapped around the drum set – that might be cool if you’re just playing a basic rock beat. But when your drummer is playing blast beats at 250 bpm and smashing crash cymbals the whole time, you can’t really do these extreme production techniques. The more extreme the music is, the less extreme the production needs to be in order to actually hear the performance.
It’s important that we hear the humanity of the performance. I don’t enjoy the process of modern metal type recordings, this data entry style of recording where things are very digital and perfect. I don’t think it’s the best presentation of our band. For me, it’s just about capturing what’s happening in the room and the feeling of what we sound and feel like live and getting that to translate to a recording more so than getting a chance to play around in the studio with fun effects pedals and recording techniques. It’s just not appropriate for us. Our songs are fully formed before we start recording them. They’re not born out of a studio experiment. They’re born out of a band of four people playing together in a room.
Do you think that strife for hyper-polished perfection in recording and production is just a trend?
I think it moves back and forth. Young musicians had the experience of growing up making music with computers, whereas we didn’t. They have a different mindset to how music is made, and that’s okay. I don’t want to be a gatekeeper of certain sonic ideals just because I’m too cool for school, or because I find it disingenuous for some arbitrary reason. I love that the technology exists and I love that there were perceived problems that engineers figured out how to address. The restraint to use or not use those tools is definitely a challenge for me and many engineers.
When it comes to recording, I want to enjoy the process. Spending hours and hours fixing drums and tuning vocals and all that kind of stuff, I don’t find that enjoyable, but I’m also not thinking about my recordings as being competitive. Especially in the modern metal world, there’s this sense of competitiveness amongst people in terms of loudness or heaviness, how low you can tune, how fast you can blast. I’m not really interested in participating in that. But on the opposite side of that spectrum, there are a lot of young people who were raised with computer-based music production that are rejecting that. You see people walking around with point-and-shoot film cameras or camcorders or wanting to record on tape. I’m not super interested in doing that stuff myself, but I love that there’s a bit of rejection of perfection, and that gives me hope. It makes me confident that AI music will not take over, because I feel like the people whose opinions I value want authenticity in their lives. Those are my people. I don’t think they’re going to be making perfect music. I don’t think they’re really interested in AI music. Music is about creative expression, enjoying spending time with your friends, and spending time with your audience. The authenticity of that stuff really matters to us.
“There’s a lot more understanding that we’re all coming to this from a place of trauma and neurodivergence and other sorts of ailments.”
When you record with Converge, how much are you in your role as a producer or engineer, and how much are you just a member of the band? I imagine those are two very different ways of looking at things …
It’s a bit of a challenge for me and for my bandmates. The longer we’ve done it, the easier it has become. When I’m a band member, I’m an equal partner with my bandmates, but when I’m a producer/engineer, I’m not. So, we have to strike a balance between which decisions should be made democratically and which don’t need that. But we have a pretty good division of labor amongst all aspects of the band. Nate and Ben both do a lot of managerial-type duties. We don’t need to have big discussions about that because we trust that they’re going to do a good job. Similarly, when I’m choosing which mic to use on the snare drum, I don’t need every member of the band to chime in. They trust me that I’m gonna make a good choice. When it comes to mixing, I get the mixes to the point where I’m ready for some constructive criticism. And then, I bring in all the band members to give me their feedback, like I would any other client. At that point, I feel like I’m working for them. I do have my own things that I’m trying to get across but mostly, I’m trying to make my band members happy.
This was the first Converge album that I mixed in my new mix room, and it was also one of the first albums that I mixed in that room in general, so my confidence wasn’t fully there. In the room where I recorded and mixed our previous records, the speakers and equipment essentially hadn’t changed in ten years. So, I was very dialed into the room and how it sounded and could make decisions really quickly and easily. Now I made some changes which are for the better, but it just takes some time to get fully dialed into that space again. So, I think I listened to other people’s opinions a little more than I might have otherwise.
2025 was your 35-year anniversary as a band. How does it feel nowadays when you get together, compared to the early days?
There’s a lot more acceptance. There’s a lot more understanding that we’re all coming to this from a place of trauma and neurodivergence and other sorts of ailments, and so the willingness to tolerate any sort of personality clashes is much different. We’re all fathers now, we’re all homeowners, and we’re all getting older and have medical conditions and stuff like that. As friends, we’re talking about our kids and our bursitis a lot more now. It’s a long-term friendship that morphs over the years. We’re all growing, aging and experiencing different but similar things along the way – and we have each other as a grounding familial relationship that’s been there for a very long time.
