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Washington Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Turnstile's new album sounds awesome, empty and irrationally inspiring
Flex your head and this new Turnstile album will feel vacuous. Here goes the reigning band in contemporary hardcore punk, refusing to articulate what they stand for or against, delivering empty gestures with tidal force. But once you get your body involved, the Baltimore quintet's fourth full-length, 'Never Enough,' becomes undeniable. This music is all rush, all urgency, a crushing avalanche of sensation, ballistic and beautiful. Why resist that? Life is short, pleasure is irrational, and if there are any mosh-like reflexes encoded in your physiology, these songs can quite literally remind you how to move through life itself. Yet, as the pit churns, peripheral clumps of lookie-loos continue to ignore this Cartesian riptide, preferring to blab on social media about the scalability of punk, the laws of gatekeeping in a digital age and whether a hardcore band should be allowed to make us feel happy the same way an Incubus song might. Does the material success of Turnstile still bum out hardcore purists? Or have hardcore's purest been quietly rooting for them all along? And what are we really gaining from this endless, tail-chasing talk about popularity and reach? Wondering whether Turnstile is bigger than Bad Brains, Black Flag or Minor Threat feels as exciting as comparing TikTok to fire, stone tools and the wheel. What's most exciting about 'Never Enough' is that it's a massive-sounding album about what isn't there. The opening title track is a vague meditation on feelings of inadequacy, somehow sung with an ardency that should instantly make anyone within earshot feel 10 feet taller. Then everything melts into homework-playlist synth ambiance, foreshadowing the dreamy confusion that lingers for the rest of the ride. On the very next track, the breakneck 'Sole,' bandleader Brendan Yates sings about feeling 'so high, there's nowhere left to lean, when everything is out of your control.' What does he mean? Unclear. But he sounds like he means it with the entirety of his being. This has to be the closest hardcore gets to skydiving, right? Massive thrills in a big emptiness. So with the help of drummer Daniel Fang, bassist Franz Lyon, and guitarists Pat McCrory and Meg Mills, the intensity and meaninglessness continue to accrue as 'Never Enough' unfolds — with much of the credit/blame falling on Yates as he makes his lyrics more aerodynamic, minimizing his consonants, going full-throttle on the vowels. It's easy to get a sense that words — or even worse, the ideas that words tend to contain — might clog up the sonic catharsis, leaving every lyric to aspire to the power of 'whoa.' Incredible singer, though. Yates can move a melody like Sting, then scream in a blazing monotone like Zack de la Rocha, toggling between modes as if redirecting the part in his hair. His sense of melody feels increasingly colorful, economical and fingerprinty in the wake of Turnstile's terrific 2021 album 'Glow On,' and he loves delivering his rainbow notes in groups of five. 'Slow Dive' has a refrain of 'oh-oh-oh-oh-oh'; on 'Dreaming,' the word 'know' grows into 'know-oh-oh-oh-oh'; throughout 'Time Is Happening,' each line lasts five syllables — and while that titular phrase is almost comically vapid, Yates makes it feel as heavy as life and death. There's a profound yearning to be felt every time he opens his throat, and if anything tethers Turnstile to the greater ideology of hardcore, maybe it's that. Or, if not, should all of this band's gorgeous nothingness be parsed as a new iteration of punk nihilism? From the Sex Pistols on down, punk's rage against our doomed future has always been underscored by a latent yearning for peace and justice. Where does Turnstile currently stand in that continuum? Who knows? But at a moment when plenty of punks are out in the street protesting rising authoritarianism and senseless war, it feels baffling for the most celebrated band in all of hardcore to be this politically inert. Regardless, the musical zeal of 'Never Enough' at least earns it Rorschach-blot status. Listen closely to these songs, then to yourself. Maybe you hear loud, friendly, exhilarating 21st-century rock music that's easy to feel, easy to feel a part of. Or maybe you hear Turnstile's blank-slated spaciousness as a gesture of possibility, inspiration and empowerment. To do what? That's on you. But whether it's out of an airplane, into a mosh pit or into the streets, this music will push you if you don't jump.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Turnstile: Never Enough review – flute solos and formidable tunes from hardcore punk's great crossover band
In April, Turnstile's name unexpectedly appeared in vast letters on the backdrop of Charli xcx's set at the Coachella festival. In the coming months, she suggested, 'Turnstile summer' would replace her ubiquitous 'Brat summer'. Hedging her bets slightly, she also suggested that 2025 would be the summer of everyone from Addison Rae and PinkPantheress to Kali Uchis to Pulp. Nevertheless, Turnstile's name stood out: the quintet are, at root, a hardcore punk band, a product of the fertile Baltimore scene that spawned Trapped Under Ice, Ruiner and Stout. For the most part, hardcore exists in its own world of rigid rules and codes, some distance from the mainstream: extant hardcore punk bands seldom get shouted out by huge pop stars. Then again, hardcore punk bands don't tend to receive Grammy nominations or make the US Top 30, as Turnstile have done. Meanwhile, Charli xcx's endorsement is just another celebrity nod in the band's direction after backing from Metallica's James Hetfield, Judas Priest's Rob Halford, R&B star Miguel and Demi Lovato, who described them as her favourite band. Their tipping point came with the release of 2021's Glow On, on which frontman Brendan Yates moved his shouty vocal style towards singing, and the band expanded their musical remit in unexpected directions. They may be the only act in history to sound like a warp-speed hardcore band in the time-honoured tradition of Minor Threat or the Circle Jerks, and – entirely without irony or satirical intent – like the kind of glossy new-wave 80s pop to which hardcore was once ideologically opposed, on adjacent tracks of the same album. Four years on, Glow On's stylistic shifts feel like a tentative dry run for Never Enough. Yates has abandoned the raw-throated aspect of his vocals entirely: the album's lyrics seem to be dealing with relationship trauma in characteristic emo style ('lost my only friend', 'it's unfair' etc), but something about his voice and melodies now recall Police-era Sting; there's an occasional hint of AutoTune in the mix, too. Some of the experiments Turnstile conducted on Glow On are repeated – the vaguely Smiths-y jangle of that album's Underwater Boi gets another airing on I Care, this time around decorated with what sounds like a Syndrum; guest Dev Hynes, better known as alt-pop auteur Blood Orange, is engaged once more on Seein' Stars, this time part of an impressive supporting cast that includes Paramore's Hayley Williams, Wire star Maestro Harrell and singer-songwriter Faye Webster. But they're joined by deeper forays into unexpected territory. Sunshower starts at 100mph, clatters to a halt, then reboots as a wall of proggy synthesiser and a lengthy flute solo, courtesy of Shabaka Hutchings. Dreaming has a curious, vaguely Latin American rhythmic slant, and horns courtesy members of jazzy funk band BadBadNotGood. Dull, meanwhile, melds beefy nu-metal inspired choruses to glitchy electronic verses, the latter presumably the work of 'additional producer' and xcx affiliate AG Cook. Elsewhere, there is neon-hued pop punk bathed in a dreamy swirl of echo (Time Is Happening), riffs borrowed from Black Sabbath (Sweet Leaf, to be specific, on Slowdive), distinctly U2-esque guitar solos and divebombing dubstep bass (Never Enough). Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion It's a lot of disparate sounds to marshal into a coherent whole, and there's something hugely impressive about how well Never Enough does it. No matter in which direction Turnstile strike out in, it surprises rather than jars, the transitions smoothed out by an unfailing hooky melodicism that applies as much to distorted riffs as it does to pop-facing vocal lines. The synth-forward pop rock of Light Design and the trad hardcore of Sole might be at different ends of the stylistic spectrum, but they're united by killer tunes. If the album has a problem, it's not a lack of ideas or songwriting ability, but the occasional sense that Turnstile have ventured so far from their starting point that they're in danger of losing their USP, or at least their ability to stamp their identity on the results. As songs, there's nothing wrong with Seein' Stars, the closing ballad Magic Man or the brief, electric piano-backed Ceiling, but they could be songs by any act within the vast, homogeneous mass of 21st-century music that exists in the grey area between rock and pop. In isolation, moments such as those can give you pause, but as part of the kaleidoscopic whole of Never Enough, they're easy to overlook. There's so much else happening, a profusion of ideas so deftly handled that it never feels sprawling or indulgent. If Turnstile's grounding in hardcore has taught them anything, it's the value of being concise. However unexpected their rise into the mainstream, it isn't about to stop. Demise of Love – Strange Little Consequence Daniel Avery, Phantasy Sound labelmate Ghost Culture and Working Men's Club combine to make moody, delightful maximalist electronic pop.
