Converge and Chelsea Wolfe released Bloodmoon: I on November 19, 2021, through Epitaph on CD and digital formats. The 11-song album brought Wolfe, her collaborator Ben Chisholm and Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky into the writing alongside Converge’s four members. Its opening track, “Blood Moon,” introduced that expanded group with a nearly eight-minute song and a music video directed by Emily Birds.
The musicians had already worked together on a European tour in 2016, performing new arrangements of Converge’s existing songs. Those shows gave them a reason to keep going: they wanted to find out what this combination of people could write together. Finding time was harder. Their schedules kept the studio project waiting until late 2019, when work on new material began at guitarist and producer Kurt Ballou’s God City studio in Salem, Massachusetts.
Plans for further sessions in 2020 ran into the pandemic. Work continued remotely, with contributions arriving at God City from across the country. The separation made Ballou’s task more complicated: he wanted the performances to feel like a band playing together. The singers helped make that possible by sharing the writing. Wolfe, Jacob Bannon and Brodsky wrote lyrics for one another, putting each voice in contact with somebody else’s phrasing and ideas. The collaboration reached into how the songs were performed, as well as who appeared on them.
“Coil” shows how far a song could travel between its writers. In a 2021 interview with Guitar.com, Ballou explained that his original version was headed for the scrap pile before Brodsky took its guitar melody and built a substantially different song around it. Letting another musician dismantle an idea required Ballou to loosen his grip on the outcome. He and Brodsky exchanged material as the songs developed, allowing an unfinished piece to become something its original writer hadn’t planned.
That flexibility also affected Ballou’s playing. “I was playing less, doing fewer tracks,” he said. He described removing parts to create space and contrast, choosing guitar sounds section by section. His production work included filling gaps in the arrangements on other instruments, including saxophone.
Wolfe pushed her voice in a different direction on “Blood Moon.” She told Revolver that she was also working on a horror film score, experimenting with harsh vocal sounds that carried over into the album. Her growled parts prompted Bannon to develop some of those passages further. Bannon told the magazine he welcomed having Wolfe and Brodsky available to sing melodies beyond his own comfortable range. Sharing the microphone gave him more ways to realize an idea, while suggestions from the other writers changed where his own voice belonged.
Much of Wolfe’s recording took place at her home studio in Northern California, a space she had already used for Birth of Violence. The distance didn’t last through the final stages. In June 2021, the musicians reunited at God City for final mixes and additional recording, Revolver reported. After building much of the album apart, the full group was together in the studio to finish it.
