Label: Roadrunner
Released: 6th June 2025
Hardcore is at its biggest crossroads in 30 years. It’s certainly basking in the glow of an elevated profile, but this is a double-edged sword for the purists and lifers. You don’t need to scratch too far beneath the surface on X and Reddit to see the old guard rail against “tourists” – people with no skin in the scene who are happy to dip in and out as they see fit. However, with the blurring of genre boundaries and the breakdown of social identities, such change is somewhat inevitable.
But it also means this powder keg is primed to blow – it just needs a spark to ignite the fuse. Indeed, the last thing the gatekeepers want right now is a genre-bending, chameleonic match being thrown into the mix by the scene’s biggest lightning rod. Well, cover your ears and shield your eyes because things are about to get supernova silly.
‘Never Enough’ might just be Turnstile’s apogee, leaning further still into their cosmic influences, as evidenced by the title track and ‘Seein’ Stars’ singles. Of course, they’re not the first hardcore band to make the jump – Cave In’s giant leap for metalcore on their iconic ‘Jupiter’ breakout is an appropriate reference point – but for Turnstile, it fits perfectly and is very much a case of ‘right place, right time’. Indeed, it feels like the culmination of the trippy interstellar journey they started so adroitly with 2018’s ‘Time & Space’ and burnished nicely on 2021’s ‘Glow On’.
Yet while they experiment and continue to push hardcore further and further away from its traditional homestead (take ‘Ceiling’, which might be the most louche these lounge lizards have ever sounded), ‘Never Enough’ still has more than enough moments that absolutely rock. ‘Dull’, once it kicks in, is just beastly, built around a gnarled riff that could crush skulls if let loose, while ‘Slow Dive’ is a crunching stomp that will get the limbs flailing. Better still, ‘Look Out for Me’ is a near-seven-minute epic, going stylishly from a menacing funk-metal riff to pristine, blissed-out indie-rock with aplomb; it’s like someone shoehorned Rage Against the Machine and the Postal Service into a collaboration. On paper it shouldn’t work; in practice it’s an undisputed highlight.
What’s most interesting, though, is the embrace of the broader punk landscape. ‘Sole’ marries the group’s passion with melodicism, recalling the sound of the late 90s melodic hardcore boom perfectly. ‘Time Is Happening’ goes further still and might just be the poppiest number in Turnstile’s catalogue, while ‘Sunshower’ bristles with the intensity and speed of any number of SoCal acts on the early EpiFat rosters.
It all makes for one of the finest hardcore (or hardcore-adjacent, for that matter) records in an age. Strident, confident, and uncompromising in its approach to style, it’s nothing short of a masterpiece.
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