Way the hell back in 2016, Boston metal and hardcore legends Converge toured Europe and played the Roadburn Festival, and they added some extra members for the occasion. For the project known as Blood Moon, Converge teamed up with doom-folk singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and Wolfe’s collaborator Ben Chisholm, as well as Cave-In/Mutoid Man leader Stephen Brodsky and Neurosis member Steve Von Till. There’s long been talk of a Blood Moon record. Now, it’s finally happening, and it’s going to be a monster.
Later this fall, we’re getting the new record Bloodmoon: I, which is being billed as a Converge/Chelsea Wolfe collaboration. It also features Chisholm and Brodsky. In a press release, Converge leader Jacob Bannon says, “We wanted to do something grander than the typical four-piece Converge music.” Today, the collective has released the new song “Blood Moon,” an eight-minute epic that moves from swirling ominous darkness to feral heaviness. The band played an earlier version of that song with Wolfe and associates at Roadburn in 2016, but now we get the studio version. It sounds incredible.
Last year, Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou got together on the collaborative album May Our Chambers Be Full. That was another team-up that came out of a collaborative Roadburn performance, and it fucking ruled. On “Blood Moon,” Converge and Chelsea Wolfe do something similar. “Blood Moon” reaches the stretched-out staring-into-infinity power of past Converge epics, but it gets there with bigger, more layered orchestration and with Chelsea Wolfe’s voice making an ideal counterpart to Jacob Bannon’s roar. This shit truly rips. Check out “Blood Moon” and the album’s tracklist below.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Blood Moon”
02 “Viscera Of Men”
03 “Coil”
04 “Flower Moon”
05 “Tongues Playing Dead”
06 “Lord Of Liars”
07 “Failure Forever”
08 “Scorpion’s Sting”
09 “Daimon”
10 “Crimson Stone”
11 “Blood Dawn”
In other Converge news, the band played two festivals this past weekend — Alabama’s Furnace Fest and Philadelphia’s Decibel Metal & Beer Festival. These were Converge’s first shows in two years. At the Decibel Fest, the band celebrated the 20th anniversary of their classic album Jane Doe by playing the album in full. They also started off the set with their cover of Entombed’s “Wolverine Blues.” They dedicated it to Entombed frontman LG Petrov, who died earlier this year. Check out the video below.
Bloodmoon: I is out 11/19 on Epitaph.
