Jane Doe, the 2001 album from Boston quartet Converge, is one of the landmark works in the recent history of heavy music, a ferocious, highly technical and wildly inventive blend of punk, hardcore, math and metal that influenced almost every similarly minded band that has followed in its wake. While Converge have never since been able to replicate that shock of the new, they are remarkably consistent, with each new album finding surprising areas of extreme noise to explore. The Dusk in Us, the band’s first album in five years, continues that trend, offering some of Converge’s most punishing efforts yet – witness the gloriously doomy riff for lead single Under Duress. It also sees the band dip their toes into subgenres such as noise rock (Murk and Marrow) and even something close to shoegaze on the title track. On this form, there are few around who can match them.
