Jacob Bannon is a busy man. Bannon is the longtime frontman of Converge, one of the best and most important bands that the American hardcore scene has ever produced. He’s also the founder of Deathwish, Inc., quite possibly our most reliable heavy-music label. As a graphic designer, he’s the guy most responsible for the metalcore distressed-font aesthetic looking the way it does. And Bannon also has a project called Wear Your Wounds, and that project has just announced a new album.
Two years ago, Wear Your Wounds released WYW, a debut album full of intense, searching, ambitious music. Wear Your Wounds started off as Bannon’s solo side gig, but it’s since become a full-on band, one that includes current and former members of other groups like Cave In, Twitching Tongues, the Red Chord, and Sleigh Bells. Their new album Rust On The Gates Of Heaven is the first one that they’ve written and recorded as a band. And they’ve just dropped a video for the seven-minute title track.
“Rust On The Gates Of Heaven” is a clangorous slow-build song. It’s not really hardcore, but hardcore is in there, somewhere, along with goth and metal and post-rock and prog. Bannon sings in his soul-flattened depressive mutter, not his electric yowl-screech. Longtime collaborator Max Moore directed the video, a dark fantasia in which a faceless woman awakens under a frozen lake and wanders through a forest.