Premature Evaluation: Turnstile Never Enough

Turnstile are breaking boundaries. They're making hardcore purists angry. They're going where no hardcore band has ever dared to go. They're reinvigorating a genre that's hampered by rote traditionalism. They're making hardcore purists hopping mad. They're opening up hardcore to whole new audiences. They're making your parents send texts like, "Do you know that band Turnstile? I saw them on Jimmy Kimmel last night." Hardcore purists are livid. Their music is aggressive but their album cover is pink 🤪. Did you see they played beer pong with Post Malone? Did you hear Charli XCX forecasted a "Turnstile summer”? Did I mention how irate they're making hardcore purists?

Ever since their 2021 album, Glow On, made them the most visible hardcore band of all time, the same narratives about Turnstile have been etched into websites ad nauseum. Music journalists who might've seen a stage-dive once have been telling you that Turnstile are the most interesting band to come out of hardcore since the last band name they read while Googling "famous hardcore bands." These well-meaning proclamations are broadly accurate in the sense that Turnstile are a genuinely huge band emerging from a genre that rarely exports its finest products to the general masses. But they miss so much about who Turnstile are as a band and what they mean to the complex, kinetic, evolving music scene they sprung from. Turnstile's fourth album, Never Enough, will be the biggest "hardcore" album of the year. It's animated. It's bold. It's compulsively likeable. It says next to nothing about where hardcore as a subculture and sound live in 2025.

To situate Turnstile is to accept that art and culture are wired with contradictions. Turnstile are at once the most important hardcore band of the 21st century and also one of the least relevant hardcore bands of the 2020s. That's not because their music isn't popular -- it's wildly popular. Or that it isn't good -- most of it is undeniably great. It's because Turnstile are no longer a hardcore band. They're a rock band who sometimes play hardcore songs. They're a band who come from hardcore, who earned their keep in hardcore, who've made some of the best hardcore in a generation, who are welcome to return to hardcore whenever they please, but who are no longer hardcore in the way hardcore bands are hardcore -- or even in the way some death metal bands are hardcore.

If you go to hardcore shows, you don't see Turnstile shirts in the crowd or hear Turnstile shoutouts coming from the stage. If you read hardcore zines or listen to some niche hardcore podcasts, you don't hear people geeking about Turnstile. If you keep up with the glut of hardcore demos that drop every week, you don't hear bands who sound like Turnstile. You don't see bands that dress like Turnstile. If you group together the 10 most popular hardcore bands of the 2020s, the only one that sounds like Turnstile is Turnstile. This isn't because Turnstile failed to pass some imaginary purity test. It's because they voluntarily exited hardcore in the aftermath of Glow On and hardcore kept it moving without them. Turnstile are acutely aware of how fraught their hardcore ties are because Never Enough is all about feeling empty and isolated at the top of the mountain. It's about wanting more, receiving everything you wanted and then some, and then realizing that you might be left with less than what you started with.

Even when Turnstile were the nucleus of hardcore, they were off on their own tip. Their 2015 debut, Nonstop Feeling, was an instant classic that arrived on the heels of two knockout 7"s, swiftly catapulting them to the forefront of the genre at a time when it had a third of the engagement that it does now. The way Nonstop Feeling gracefully pooled together elements from every prior epoch (Bad Brainsy flavor, Madball swagger, Terror bite) while subtly stretching hardcore's melodic borders delighted younger listeners and gave jaded old-heads an opportunity to reinvest in hardcore through a band that sounded familiar yet refreshing. It also infuriated a loud minority of joyless burnouts who bemoaned Turnstile's 311 riff-jocking and free-spirited Keith Haring aesthetic. There were always Turnstile haters, and they never made a dent in the band's ascent.

For their next two records, the sleeker Time & Space (2018) and the much sleeker Glow On, that same cycle repeated at exponentially larger scales. Turnstile made the music they wanted to hear. The songs were great -- the shows even better -- so their audiences grew. The marginal opposition of cranky detractors were framed as coup d'état militants trying to oust Turnstile from hardcore for their indie-pop indiscretions. Hardcore, a genre that couldn't be more polylithic, was reduced to a stodgy monolith in the discourse, and Turnstile were heralded as prison escapees who heroically crashed through the gates of a genre that's just too damn pure to tolerate their penchant for Blood Orange guest vocals and tasteful Moog synths. In reality, Turnstile outgrew hardcore by becoming a rock band that tours with Blink-182, and hardcore's widespread embrace of heavier, meaner sounds -- a zeitgeist shift that preceded Glow On, if you consider the other biggest hardcore bands entering the 2020s: Knocked Loose, Code Orange, Power Trip, Gulch -- made Turnstile's chipper sound feel incongruent with the ongoing reign of crowdkill fodder.

Never Enough doesn't attempt to meet hardcore where it is now; it happily takes several more strides away from it. What makes it an interesting record isn't the novelty of a nominally hardcore band making (mostly) non-hardcore music. Never Enough is an interesting rock record because Turnstile know how to write good rock songs. The opening title track is virtually a carbon copy of Glow On’s opener, "Mystery," but like Pusha T rapping about cocaine or Yo La Tengo scatting out a "ba-ba" hook, Turnstile's formula is so primordially satisfying that nit-picking redundancies seems frivolous. Songs like "Sole," "Dull" and "Look Out For Me" flaunt the same kind of Rage Against The Machine-ish riffs Turnstile have been pumping out for a decade now, but Never Enough’s elevated production -- punchier guitars, wetter reverb, glazier vocals -- allows Turnstile to make up for in stereo-cranking listenability what they lack in six-string innovation.

The best moments on Never Enough are when Turnstile exploit their music's fundamental appeals: fat riffs, vibrant energy, and choruses that sound as good to sing in the shower as they do to scream at the sun. In "Look Out for Me," frontman Brendan Yates yelps, "Now my heart is hangin' by a thread!" -- a killer one-liner -- and then the instrumentation comes slamming down at just the right moment like a Looney Tunes anvil. "Sunshower," the album's fastest and most viscerally pleasing cut, centers the kind of effortless pop hook that Yates has been puffing out since "Blue By You." The whiffs aren't so much cloying as they are boring. "I Care" sounds closer to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" than Turnstile ever should, and "Seein' Stars," which meekly boasts a near-inaudible Hayley Williams feature, is another glassy indie-pop song that sounds like Current Joys in the booth with Dave Navarro (Pusha-T voice: "yuugh"). Turnstile make it right with "Light Design," a watery alt-rock gem where Yates' melty vocals have a meaty riff to slather over, and the rhythm section nestles into a pocket that sounds the way it feels to wear a perfect-fitting pair of baggy pants.

The only truly frustrating sections on Never Enough are the momentum-killing clutter. Several of the album's best songs dissolve abruptly into chintzy new-age stardust ("Never Enough"), generic house beats ("Look Out For Me"), and pretty yet awkwardly placed jazz flute flutterings ("Sunshower"). Sure, Bad Brains gunked up their blazing albums with middling reggae trots, but at least those stylistic deviations communicated the band's Rastafarian ethos and helped listeners better understand the spiritual philosophies guiding their music. On Never Enough, Turnstile's interstitial swerves outside of guitar-based rock don't carry the same degree of ideological weight. There's nothing radical about signaling to their audience that they like Fred again.. now, and saddling their most urgent songs with multi-minute chunks of vibey electronica has a more meandering than meditative effect. Rather than bolster their band's artistic identity, Turnstile sound like they're experimenting just to prove how eclectic their personal tastes are -- a gambit that feels questionable when their supposed renaissance-man predilections manifested in Teezo Touchdown, one of the corniest rappers alive, opening their album release show.

Still, Never Enough’s most pretentious maneuvers would be far more grating if it sounded like Turnstile's fame was going to their heads. Yates has been singing about feeling lonely and beaten down by the "Pressure To Succeed" since Turnstile's debut EP, and beneath the radiant exterior of Glow On was an ensemble of muted cries about insecurity and isolation. The even sparklier Never Enough ruminates on many of the same melancholy themes. "Never Enough" hovers majestically, but Yates can't shake the feeling that he's "sinking into the floor." In "Sole," he feels guilty for tugging on his loved ones for support and concludes that he's better off alone at this stratospheric vantage point ("So high there's nowhere left to lean"). The recent footage of Turnstile playing to 10,000 screaming fans hits different when Yates lets you know what's really going through his head during his band's routine victory laps. "This is where I wanna be/ But I can't feel a fuckin' thing," he swipes during "Sunshower."

Never Enough says a lot about the weird, singular place Turnstile have ended up at. It's a record about a band of restlessly creative hardcore kids who somehow became one of the biggest actually good rock bands in the world, and now have the clout to have Faye Webster and A.G. Cook contribute unnoticeable guest features to their album that's also a wide release movie. Turnstile are doing cool shit, but almost all of it runs counter to what hardcore has sounded, felt, and looked like in the post-Glow On years. Knocked Loose, the second biggest hardcore band this century, are playing the same late night shows as Turnstile and gearing up to tour with Metallica, but their snarling sound and malevolent aesthetic are more resemblant of hardcore's present-day disposition than Turnstile's.

The other hardcore bands running the show this decade -- Sunami, Speed, Mindforce, Pain Of Truth -- are cold, mercilessly heavy, and fundamentally fixated on making audiences mosh hard, a function Turnstile's music hasn't aimed to service in over a decade. Scowl are the closest parallel to Turnstile's hardcore/alt-rock hybrid, but the Dead Oceans signees have felt uncoupled from the broader hardcore underground for a while now. The same goes for press darlings Militarie Gun, a good band who I've seen play to crickets at hardcore fests on the same days that Sanction and xWeaponx brought down the house with pummeling pit fodder. At festivals and regional touring stops, it's bands that are sinister (Misisng Link, Never Ending Game), angsty (Balmora, Scarab), raw (Haywire), and apocalyptically bludgeoning (Torture, Final Resting Place) that get the most spirited reactions right now.

The fiction that Turnstile cast a jubilant, free-loving spell on hardcore with Glow On, or that Never Enough’s shimmering veneer is somehow reflective of a more light-hearted vibe shift within the culture, is nonsensical. Hardcore isn't a vague signifier like "indie rock" or an abstract taxonomy like "post-punk." It's a culture formed around an eclectic array of regionally and generationally distinct micro-sounds. It's not a single, unified philosophy -- it's many individual philosophies that compete and cohere within a symbiotic whole. Hardcore is more popular than ever right now, more prolific than ever right now, more stylistically varied than ever right now, and Turnstile, in their current incarnation, are firmly adjacent to it. As a grassroots hardcore fan, what I like about Never Enough is how un-hardcore it sounds. Bright, bubbly, winsome, wistful. I'm a hardcore hardcore purist, and Never Enough makes me happy.

Turnstile - Never Enough [Purple Vinyl]

27.98

Amazon

Never Enough is out 6/6 via Roadrunner.