Converge / Jacob Bannon: The Conflict is the Point. A solid chat with Jacob on the new Converge album, being a visual artist and much more. By Mark Jenkins.
Converge / Jacob Bannon: The Conflict is the Point. A solid chat with Jacob on the new Converge album, being a visual artist and much more. By Mark Jenkins.
There are bands that exist within a scene, and there are bands that exist despite one.
Converge have always been the latter. Emerging from Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1980s, they built something that defied every attempt to contain it — too extreme for the punk crowd, too chaotic for metal, too emotional for hardcore purists, too uncompromising for anyone looking for an easy entry point. They didn't fit, and they never tried to. Thirty-five years on, with a catalogue that stands as one of the most ferocious and uncompromising bodies of work in heavy music, they are still operating entirely on their own terms. No major label. No softening. No nostalgia act slow fade. Just forward motion, album after album, each one its own distinct statement.
At the centre of that — visually, lyrically, spiritually — is Jacob Bannon. As the band's vocalist and primary visual architect, he is responsible for one of the most distinctive aesthetic identities in underground music. The artwork, the layouts, the record covers, the hand-built visual language that makes a Converge release immediately identifiable from twenty feet away — that's Jacob.
The words that tear themselves off the page in the liner notes, the lyrics that read less like songs and more like someone working something out in real time, under pressure, in the dark — that's Jacob too. He runs Deathwish Inc., one of the most respected independent labels operating in heavy music. He makes gallery art. He sculpts. He paints. He collages. He has been doing all of this simultaneously, without stopping, for the better part of four decades, and the work has not gotten quieter or safer or more comfortable with age. If anything, it has gotten stranger, more complex, more itself.
He is also, by his own candid account — including in the remarkable ongoing document that is his Substack — a parent, a person who has to do the laundry, who navigates the economic reality of being a working artist without the cushion of mainstream success, who keeps himself physically and mentally functional enough to keep making things. The mythology and the mundane, occupying the same life simultaneously. That tension is not incidental to the work. It is the work.
Jacob Bannon is not a man who does things by half.
Singer, visual artist, label head, father, human being trying to keep it together like the rest of us — he carries a weight of output that would flatten most people. He does it without the safety net of a major label, a management machine, or any of the infrastructure the industry usually uses to insulate artists from the reality of their own lives. What you get with Jacob is the real thing, all the way down.
This conversation initially came together with the recent release of Love Is Not Enough — the new Converge record, and one that hits with the kind of blunt-force honesty the band has always been capable of but rarely this directly. Short, raw, progressive in the way that only a band thirty-plus years deep and still genuinely restless can be. No fat. No compromise. Just Converge doing what Converge does when they stop caring what anyone expects and start following the thing itself.
INTERVIEW LINK:
We covered a lot of ground. The brutal arithmetic of balancing a band, a label in Deathwish Inc., a visual art practice that spans collage, painting, sculpture, gallery work and the kind of instinct-driven layered process that traces back — honestly — to making zines by hand in the early DIY days. We talked about what it means to keep the punk spirit alive, not as an aesthetic but as actual practice, as a way of operating, as a refusal. We talked about fatherhood, fitness, staying sane, the unglamorous daily reality that the Substack — one of the most quietly essential artist documents being published right now — captures with a clarity that most musicians would never risk.
We went into the Jane Doe gravity, the way a record can become mythology and how mythology can sometimes obscure the work that came after it, which in Converge's case is the stronger, stranger, more unsettling body of work anyway. We talked about lyrics as self-exposure, the cost of baring the soul repeatedly, the question of whether that particular well ever runs dry or just keeps finding new depth to pull from. We talked about the tension between melody and aggression that defines the Converge sound — not a compromise between the two but a genuine ongoing conflict, unresolved by design.
We talked about commissions versus free work(and/or pure creative work), the economy of making art for a living, the difference in headspace between work that feeds you financially and work that feeds you as a person, and how you hold both without one consuming the other. We discussed the album themes, the personal reckoning that runs through the lyrics, and the experience of using music as both a creative outlet and a cathartic release simultaneously. And yes — we floated the possibility of an Australian tour, because this country has waited long enough.
What you're about to watch is a conversation between two people who love this music and take it seriously. No press release talking points. No managed distance. Just the thing itself.
Support all his glorious work, and as always, every Converge album is essential. So fucking buy the new record, it's a beast.
https://convergecult.bandcamp.com/album/love-is-not-enough
https://www.epitaph.com/artists/Converge/release/love-is-not-enough
JACOB/CONVERGE LINKS:
https://jacobbannon.com/
https://jacobbannon.substack.com/
https://www.convergecult.com/
bannonprinting.com
umbravitae.com
wearyourwounds.net
bloodfromthesoul.com
deathwishinc.com
(Grey picture at the beginning of this section by Reid Haithcock) and all other from the band's social media or Google search( artists listed if documented)
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