The first time I ever saw anyone do a backflip in a moshpit was at a Converge show. The Boston hardcore veterans have always been that type of band -- the type whose furious, roiling blasts practically demand new forms of physical expression in response. For more than a quarter century, Converge have taken aggression and anxiety and rage and fear and blurred them into one ferocious whole, a kind of music that's all angles and elbows. The entire metalcore subgenre owes its life, more or less, to Converge, but they've never been comfortable with that label, and they shouldn't be comfortable in that label. There's hardcore in Converge's music, and there's metal, but the music they make is primal and intense and otherworldly enough that it almost exists outside genre tags. (I used "hardcore" in that second sentence because Converge are culturally hardcore -- that show with the backflipping guy was a Sunday-afternoon matinee with Glassjaw -- but "hardcore" has never quite fit as a descriptor of their music.) In their early years, Converge's style was mathematical brutalism, so dense and off-kilter that it could inspire a kid to go from kickboxing and windmilling to straight-up gymnastics. In later years, Converge discovered dread and groove and atmosphere, and some of their songs became Neurosis-style monster-trudges that were somehow even more intense than the geometric blasts of old. But for all the ways that they've changed, and all the ways that they've changed the face of heavy music, it's still pretty goddam striking that The Dusk In Us, Converge's first album in five years, opens with a love song.