In exactly one month, Turnstile will release their feverishly anticipated new album Never Enough. It's their follow-up to the massively consequential 2021 LP Glow On, which means it's a hugely important album, both for Turnstile themselves and for the hardcore underworld that Glow On helped expose to the larger population. Thus far, Turnstile have shared three songs -- the title track, "Seein' Stars," and "Birds" -- that all suggest radically different musical directions. Apparently, that's only the beginning of the "mad flavors" that Turnstile bring to the new album.
The "mad flavors" line comes from Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons. The whole band takes part in a profile that Matthew Schnipper wrote for The New York Times. It gets into the band's history and its place within the hardcore subculture, and it's got frontman Brendan Yates talking about what hardcore means to him:
Hardcore music in general can be about grief, sadness, anger, happiness, joy, triumph. It can be all of those things, but I feel like it always presents as something that makes you feel good. The heaviness and the aggression are a healthy way to process some of those feelings that humans naturally have. I think if you don’t have something like that in your life, it might come out in more destructive ways... The reason that I was drawn to hardcore in the first place was to express yourself exactly the way you want.
In the Times profile, Yates speaks generally about the band's quest to express new things, sometimes outside of the bounds of hardcore: "Anytime you put out something new, you lose a bunch of people. You kind of just embrace it... The music we make is not necessarily defined by the sounds, it’s defined by the people. If the music is not reflective of the people, then what is it?"
New Turnstile guitarist Meg Mills, formerly of Chubby And The Gang and Big Cheese, doesn't play on Never Enough, though she's in all the videos as a full member of the band. Brendan Yates and guitarist Pat McCrory co-directed videos for every song on the album. Schnipper writes that some of Franz Lyons and Daniel Fang's rhythm-section work explores "the outer limits of funk and heaviness" and that Fang has been undergoing somatic therapy while Lyons has been taking lessons with Joe Lally of Fugazi and the Messthetics. Also, Brendan Yates offers up this: "I’ll watch, like, Glee and cry over a song. At a certain moment, I’ll be like, 'Why am I crying right now? I don’t even know.'"
With all these quotes, Never Enough remains a total mystery. I can't wait to hear it. It's out 6/6 on Roadrunner. Read the Times profile here.
