4 out of 5

Label: Epic / Deathwish (vinyl)

Produced by: Jacob Bannon

A gratifyingly hefty mass of hardcore punk, No Heroes is Converge – mostly – stripped back to basics: intense, short blasts of metal – Jacob Bannon-screeched, Kurt Ballou / Nate Newton thrashed, Ben Kwoller pumelled. No Heroes is a fittingly clean cut album title, as there’s no exact precedent here except to move ahead, rockingly. The disc blazes through five tracks of mayhem in about five minutes, impressive in that the group sticks mainly to a straight-forward attack: this is not time changey, stop-on-a-dime Converge, but the group focused on being loud and precise, an approach highlighted by Ballou’s lesser focus (than usual) on low-end bluster with his production. And while that might seem like it removes a lot of what made the band unique, it instead underlines their skill at imbuing their work with endless energy and inventiveness, delivering compelling variations on their theme throughout. The sole hitch comes when they try to break this up with a reprieve: the five-minute, slow-burn chugga chugga of Plagues is ultimately rather repetitive, and the 9 minute ‘Grim Heart / Black Rose,’ while ultimately paying off in its latter half, similarly seems to stall on a riff / chorus (delivered by Jonah Jenkins for Raw Radar War). These are good tracks, but they’re certainly lacking in the rest of the disc’s punky immediacy, nor are they as diverse and lush as tracks from other albums of this slower, sludgier form. On the other hand, they are, essentially, consistent with that stripped back style…

The songs backing up these two are ridiculously strong and memorable: Lonewolves, in particular, sticks out for employing shouty vocals instead of growly ones (a simple change, but it works wonders to make it distinct…), and although Trophy Scars edges up to five minutes again, it lands on a hook that has a kind of pleasing familiarity to it… Pleasing in a shouty, break-yer-eardrums Converge kinda way, anyhow.

No Heroes definitely stands out as a transition point album, from the emo-y metal of Jane Doe era to the blistering bravado of later albums like All We Love, but instead of suffering from the wishy-washiness that affects most transition discs, Converge keep the energy at max by keeping things – for them – relatively simple, and giving our earholes the heavy metal punk we want.