You feel it before you hear it. When you hear it, you can’t un-hear 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. Windsor, Ontario. It’s been haunting 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 re-imagined it as a physical manifestation of human suffering. “What if the Hum is the culmination of all the pain in the world creating an audible hum across the universe?” vocalist and lyricist Jacob Bannon posits. “Something noticeable to others operating on a similar frequency.”
Hum of Hurt follows Love Is Not Enough as Converge’s second full-length release of 2026. Like its predecessor, the album presents a bleak but empathetic assessment of the human condition and its ongoing deterioration. Unlike Love Is Not Enough, the songs are rawer and more exposed. “When we got together to write, we ended up with a lot of material,” Bannon says. “We realized it was two separate albums.”
Hum of Hurt is a different record than Love is Not Enough, but just as volatile and potent. “It’s not part two,” Bannon points out. “The only unifying thing we talked about when we started working on this entire project was, ‘Let’s make a noise rock record.’ But we never really did. The first one isn’t a noise rock record. This one has moments, maybe, but it’s not a noise rock record either. It feels more like an emotional hardcore record than the first one, which is probably more metal leaning. Really, we just gave birth to another Converge record.”
