7.8

Bigger Than They’ve Ever Been, Turnstile Aim For the Stratosphere on NEVER ENOUGH

The Baltimore punks’ fourth album presents them at their most tempered while demonstrating a refusal to rest on their laurels.

By Grant Sharples  |  June 5, 2025 | 9:30am
Music Reviews TURNSTILE
Bigger Than They’ve Ever Been, Turnstile Aim For the Stratosphere on NEVER ENOUGH

The centerpiece of Turnstile’s new album, NEVER ENOUGH, is “Look Out For Me,” a seven-minute opus that begins with their signature hardcore crunch, which slowly morphs into a muted Baltimore club beat halfway through. It’s an ambitious track from its runtime alone; that’s more than a quarter of 2018’s Time & Space. But it’s that lofty sense of ambition that allows Turnstile’s fourth album to truly soar. They’ve already ascended to new heights due to the major success and stylistic leaps of 2021’s GLOW ON, transforming them from hardcore luminaries to bona fide rock stars with celebrity fans and institutional approval (a rock band with Grammy noms that isn’t associated with Dave Grohl?!). Suffice it to say, NEVER ENOUGH is the band’s answer to what everyone’s subconsciously been wondering: Will GLOW ON allow them to grow on?

Thankfully, Turnstile aren’t ones to rest on their laurels. They’ve harnessed the bigger budget and wider audience to their benefit. Complacency is out of the question. The long-awaited NEVER ENOUGH marks another level-up in terms of sonic expansion. It’s not as striking as the one they made with its predecessor. Rather, it’s more subtle. Turnstile’s latest incorporates novel flourishes such as a horn riff on “DREAMING,” a New Blue Sun-esque flute solo on “SUNSHOWER,” the flickering synth lead toward the end of the new-wavey “I Care,” and a glitched-out sound collage that surfaces throughout “DULL.” But NEVER ENOUGH mostly builds on the foundation they laid out with GLOW ON. The opening one-two punch of the title track into “SOLE” evokes the now-classic “MYSTERY” and “BLACKOUT” duo. “Dreaming” deploys the reggaetón beat and auxiliary percussion from “Don’t Play.”

To say that this is all just more of the same, though, would be reductive. NEVER ENOUGH doesn’t act as a serviceable carbon copy so much as it does solid groundwork for how Turnstile navigate the path forward. There are more interstitial synth-pad interludes, often baked into the songs themselves instead of being standalone, one-minute tracks (aside from “CEILING,” that is). It lends a cohesion and contrast to the circle-pit riffage that’s long been their hallmark, making the head-banging moments stand out more where they would typically blend in. Will Yip returns from his work on Time & Space to contribute some engineering and production work. As is Yip’s modus operandi, he grants some of the punchy panache that’s so central to Turnstile’s appeal, most prominently on NEVER ENOUGH’s heartier moments, like early-album beatdown “SOLE” and the interlude-fakeout moment in “LIGHT DESIGN.”

But, generally speaking, NEVER ENOUGH presents Turnstile at their most tempered. The Hayley Williams- and Dev Hynes-featuring “SEEIN’ STARS” demonstrates their self-restraint: the knowledge of when to hold back paired with a canny understanding of how to inject some edge into a nu-disco tune, of which there are many contemporary analogs. Throwing in an arena-rock solo from lead guitarist Pat McCrory and groovy bassline from Franz Lyons will certainly do the trick. It also helps that “BIRDS,” potentially the closest they get to good ‘ol hardcore on here, comes directly after it.

Even the certified rippers come with some downtime, like the sweaty cool that follows an intense mosh pit, a needed respite after the high-octane adrenaline rush. “BIRDS” is an outlier in the sense that its energy is self-contained. “DULL” and “SUNSHOWER,” on the other hand, take detours from their heavy starting points into various aural terrains. The former charts a course from headbanging hardcore into their version of musique concrète. The latter begins with drummer Daniel Fang’s blistering double-time that’d be right at home on Nonstop Feeling, only to find itself at a New Age endpoint with washes of synth ambience and spiritual jazz flute.

Both tracks are apt theses for NEVER ENOUGH as a whole. They’re also microcosms for the State of Turnstile, hardcore’s most famous exports who don’t view punk’s ethos as a rigid rulebook but as a canvas to experiment freely. If NEVER ENOUGH makes anything clear, it’s that Turnstile refuse to be limited by their roots. They’re grounded in hardcore, but this is an album that extends their palette beyond it, reimagining the possibilities of the scene that bred them while retrofitting their sound to suit increasingly larger venues. Their last album saw them reach an audience they likely never imagined the scope of, but with all eyes and ears on them, when they essentially are the litmus test for what’s achievable in hardcore, NEVER ENOUGH posits them as its modern torchbearers. Even if they may not view it that way themselves, the music seems to say otherwise.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.

 
Join the discussion...