Turnstile- "Never Enough" Is More Than Enough

Grab your board and lace up your shoes, "Turnstile Summer" is underway.

I think I was 18 or 19 years old the first time I heard Title Fight play. I remember standing in the hot summer Texas sun at the Mohawk on Red River street waiting for Converge to play, and all of a sudden this group of unassuming kids in loose-fit denim from Kingston, PA took the stage. They were followed quickly by a cohort of 20 or so teenagers that took over the crowd with the kind of energy that made damn sure everyone knew that we were watching the greatest punk act alive.

This was of course a year or two before Title Fight would explode onto the alternative music scene with groundbreaking albums like Floral Green and Hyperview. But for that short time in the early 2010s, Title Fight were the band that captured all the energy of youth music culture. It wasn’t underpinned by any groundbreaking cultural shift, or political messaging, it was just a feeling within a point and time, it was a channel for the energy and creativity of that generation. It’s what I might imagine someone my age must have felt in the late 70s watching the Ramones.

Since that time many bands and artistic movements have tried to inspire the same outburst of enthusiasm that underpinned iconic “time and place” bands. I don’t go to nearly as many punk shows as I used to, but one band I’ve heard mentioned by the much younger and cooler-than-I denizens of local record stores is Turnstile, a group who spent the latter 2010s building a steady following in the northeast. In fact, Turnstile was the opening act at Title Fight’s final show in 2018, which is something I didn’t know until I began writing this review.

 Turnstile performing in 2018

But it wasn’t until the start of this decade that Turnstile really began to explode out of the hardcore punk scene they had made their home in. They had certainly built up a dedicated fanbase and some critical acclaim following their major label debut Time & Space in 2018, but they took a drastic left turn into mainstream appeal with 2021’s Glow On which saw the Baltimore band drastically expand their sound into other genres including post-punk, dream-pop, and even samba. Glow On netted the band, made up at that time of vocalist Brendan Yates, guitarists Brady Ebert and Pat McCroy, bassist Franz Lyons, and drummer Daniel Fang, a huge amount of crossover appeal and media attention, even landing the band a spot on network television via The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and a deal for their own model of Converse shoes.

The expansive and genre-defying sound of Glow On left many fans in suspense about what would come next, particularly since after the release of the album, the group replaced founding guitarist Brady Ebert with newcomer Meg Mills. It seemed like on Glow On, the band had pushed the boundaries of hardcore punk as far as it would go, so what could it possibly do in its wake?

In May of this year Turnstile hosted a free benefit concert in Baltimore’s Wyman Park, the concert was a debut for new material off their upcoming album titled Never Enough, but it was more than that, for the band it was a show of cultural dominance. The group played their songs on a simple portable stage with no lighting and a basic 10 foot backdrop, all the while more than 10,000 fans poured into Wyman Park to hear them. There were no barricades, no barriers, no tickets, just one band and thousands of kids having fun. It was the beginning of Turnstile summer.

Turnstile's performance at Wyman Park this year

Never Enough dropped on June 6th of this year while I was vacationing in Canada, and even in the far-off record stores of Montreal, everyone seemed to be this record with the grainy blue cover. While Never Enough is not quite as groundbreaking as Glow On, the band has taken the sound they experimented with on that album and honed it into a finely polished pop record with enough edge to please both fans and newcomers.

This album leans far heavier into pop, particularly 80s inspired dream pop, than anything the band has done up through this point. Right from the opening synth organ on the title track, vocalist Brendan Yates has much more room to explore his range. Outside of the opener, there are thoroughly melodic pop-rock songs on here, including the summery ‘I Care’, the Smashing-Pumpkins-infused ‘Light Design’, and then my favorite track ‘Seein’ Stars’ which sounds as if it could be an unreleased B-side from The Police in their heyday.

Still, Turnstile has infused into the album enough of its historical sound to give it an undeniable fingerprint, such as the weighty breakdowns on ‘Dull’, or the breakneck speed of ‘Birds’. Turnstile is still a punk band at heart, which makes it more impressive that they seem to have created a well-crafted pop album with a musical diversity that feels organic rather than forced.

What is more impressive than the individual songs here though, is just how well the album flows, and has its own musical identity that carries itself across the diverse collection of tracks. This is aided by excellent transitions and the use of synths as a both a palate cleanser from the more energetic songs and as compositions in their own right, such as the song ‘Ceiling’ which provides the perfect acclimation to the reverb-drenched guitars of ‘Seein’ Stars’. Yate’s lyrics fit perfectly with album’s aesthetic as well, exploring more interpersonal and contextual themes such as isolation, the strain of relationships romantic and platonic, and the weight and burden of artistic success.

While not being the type of music that normally receives the kind of sonic attention we at the Tracking Angle crave, Never Enough does have some decent audiophile bonafides. That includes mixing by Grammy-winning engineer Adam Hawkins, and mastering by Chris Gehringer at Sterling Sound in New Jersey. Missing the early brick-and-mortar rush, I settled for an Amazon-exclusive purple variant pressed by XDiSC in Poland, a plant I didn’t have much in the way of experience with until now.

The sound was admittedly loud, and compressed, at least by the standards of the great classic rock albums. But by modern pop and rock standards this is a pretty decent sounding mastering job; punchy drums, good instrumental separation, and a nice spaciousness that contributes to the aesthetic of the album. My real qualms are that the mastering is just not particularly dynamic, and everything is just kind of artificially forced to the top. It’s not exactly surprising given the mass-market appeal of a record intended to be played across America on car stereos and Bluetooth speakers, but I think if you walk into this album knowing that limitation you will be pleasantly surprised by how good it can sound at times, especially when the sound is more “stripped down”.

With Never Enough, Turnstile has succeeded in not only crafting a punk album with mass-appeal, but also in crafting a pop album that will help genre-outsiders dip their toes into breakdowns and blast beats. For those reasons it should be applauded, not as the statement of any particular style, but just for being from start to finish a great artistic expression. There’s quite simply nothing on this lean runtime that I ever wanted to skip over, which is a testament to prudent artistic choices. Turnstile might be the sound of a generation younger than mine, but if this is the hit of the summer, I’m convinced the kids are alright.