NEVER ENOUGH
Turnstile is hardly the first band raised in a tight-knit DIY hardcore punk scene to graduate to big-tent popularity and grapple with what that success should look like. For the Baltimore-based five-piece, a stint opening for blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour served as a hands-on apprenticeship. “That summer was definitely a master class of existing in that space,” Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Riding with blink, they’re great people, but also their supporting cast—everything they do behind the scenes is very sharp, and it was cool to be in a situation where you have to learn how to mend your creative way to a different lens.” These lessons all came in handy in the making of their fourth album, *NEVER ENOUGH*, which doubles down on the genre-expanding—and, subsequently, audience-expanding—twists of 2021’s breakthrough *GLOW ON* and throws in an ambitious visual-album component that ties all 14 songs together. Among those songs are not just the tuneful, heavy midtempo anthems like the title track and “DULL” and hopped-up hardcore like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” that made *GLOW ON* stand out, but even bolder stylistic gambits like “I CARE” and “SEEIN’ STARS,” which channel The Smiths and The Police, respectively. The nearly seven-minute centerpiece “LOOK OUT FOR ME” somehow seems to incorporate bits of all of these at once. For singer Brendan Yates, who also produced the album, this is all part of a more thoughtful, confident, and collaborative approach to songwriting that was certainly helped by the luxury of having more time—and more resources—to let ideas evolve. “If there is a song that’s just very simple and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and maybe people are going to hate this, but the intangible is really there for me right now,’” he says. “So it’s like embracing that.” And sometimes trying new and more daring things also means throwing all those away in the end. Yates cites the album-closing “MAGIC MAN” as a song that began as a demo with just himself and a synth, expanded and contracted through many more iterations, and ultimately wound up as…just himself and a synth. Turnstile credits their versatility and trust in one another to having spent half their lives in Baltimore’s punk scene learning instruments on the fly, playing in multiple bands at once, and innately understanding the importance of community. These lessons, too, come in handy as the band begins to find themselves headlining the kinds of venues—possibly with pit-unfriendly seats—where they very recently were guests. What looks from the outside like complex ambition really is, from the band’s vantage point, little more than close friends with shared history indulging one another’s biggest swings. “When trust is your really big element that makes things function easily, that involves people’s happiness, too,” says Yates. “And being able to just be happy to do what you’re doing and be happy looking forward to what you’re about to do, it requires a certain amount of willingness to throw yourself into the deep end.”
The biggest band in hardcore grows big enough to encompass electronic rhythms and flute meditation. Its new album winks to outsize expectations but answers to a higher calling.
On their exceptional new album 'Never Enough', Turnstile double down on the vibrant eccentricity of 2021’s ‘Glow On’ – read the NME review
If NEVER ENOUGH proves one thing, it's that Turnstile has a bright blue horizon ahead of them.
More is more! Hardcore and art continue to merge as Turnstile return with long-awaited fourth album, NEVER ENOUGH...
A vital, exhilarating offering, sure to catapult them further out of the hardcore scene and ever closer to mainstream musical lore.
Baltimore hardcore giants Turnstile push their sound again on the ambitious fourth album, Never Enough
On Saturday, May 10th, Baltimore natives and hardcore royalty Turnstile descended on Wyman Park Dell, performing for the first time in nearly two years
NEVER ENOUGH by Turnstile album review by Blake Correll for Northern Transmissions. The band's new LP drops on June 6th via Roadrunner
The Charli xcx-approved quintet further their unlikely leap into the mainstream with this deft dash through pop and rock idioms – from emo to Sting, funk and nu-metal