Turnstile’s Never Enough lies somewhere between the working man’s folk-rock earnestness of the bygone SoCal era and the synth-washed ambience of the cover.
I was still trying to get my head around Turnstile’s new album when I happened upon a cover story on the band. Quinn Batley’s photo captures the members from a low angle, the sun glowing behind them, either setting or rising. Lightly psychedelic, it could be a classic LP cover from Columbia or Fantasy in the late 1960s, from an early Moby Grape, Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Byrds album. Except Turnstile are in Baltimore, not California, they’re perched on the gravel embankment of the Northeast Corridor rail line. An Amtrak train cuts across the frame from right to left behind them, and two-fifths of the band are looking off into the distance, either where the train came from or where it’s heading.
I know, it’s not the band’s own photo—the minimalist cover of Never Enough, akin to the pink-and-white clouds that graced Glow On, their breakout album from three years ago, is a washed-out wedge of a double rainbow on a sky-blue background. The music inside lies somewhere between the working man’s folk-rock earnestness of that bygone California era and the synth-washed ambience of the actual cover. While it may not make sense for Amtrak to embody the bedrock of the Turnstile sound, the national railroad company created in the 1970s is somehow fitting for a band that continues to bridge the gap between the DC and Baltimore music scenes on an album recorded in SoCal.
While a train is probably not the first thing I’d associate with a hardcore punk band, it’s certainly a lot closer than the jet-ski that opens both the video for “Never Enough” and the band’s video album, directed by front-man Brendan Yates and lead guitarist Pat McCrory and currently playing in movie theaters across the country. It’s a jarring, if not actively disturbing, image to begin the record: Yates isolated in midframe against an empty expanse of ocean, an icon of conspicuously empty, gas-guzzling, and noise-polluting consumption.
New guitarist Meg Mills (who joined Turnstile after the album was recorded) is introduced in a snow-bound wilderness next to her isolated vehicle; bassist Franz Lyons, popping out of an anonymous crowd in a gaudily-colored jacket, is suitably ignored by the passersby as a Black man among white commuters; McCrory rips off chords in a richly saturated green field; drummer Daniel Fang sits alone in the desert, the multiple components of his kit and some empty chairs the only hint of collectivity.
It’s a salutary reminder that the music video is not only a genre of advertising but also a distinct form of music-making. It’s a challenge to us, as well as to the band, to decide whether the album’s and the lead song’s title embraces the consumption run rampant that punk so often rails against or evokes the unfulfilled—and often unfulfillable—desires into which punk has always channeled its youthful energies.
Given that Turnstile, whose popularity unexpectedly exploded with their genre-bending 2022 release, Glow On, recorded Never Enough in a state-of-the-art Laurel Canyon studio, the Mansion (a process lovingly and joyously documented in several of the non-singles on the album video), this seems a pressing question. It’s a question they both resolve and leave hanging throughout Never Enough’s pulsating 45-minute duration, pogoing thrillingly between monstrously pounding hardcore and ambient, house, sound effects, and pretty much anything else one can imagine.
There’s no clear breakdown between the embracing community the band laud in the Baltimore and DC hardcore scenes they came up in and the cloistered pop royalty to which they now belong—featured guests on the album include cell Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange (cello and additional vocals on several tracks), Shabaka (the extended flute outro on “Seein’ Stars”), and additional vocals by Paramore‘s Hayley Williams, Faye Webster, and others.
Instead, Never Enough challenges us to hold these scenes together as we parse our own desires for both, creating ample space at once to reflect on our choices and to lose ourselves in the music, body-surfing their collective spirit. They may have gone to the UK for a new guitarist and to California to find the space to create this LP, but they nonetheless cling fast to the hardscrabble city and music scenes in which they continue to live.
In addition to its studios and its pop-rock history, Southern California also offers an extraordinarily varied set of landscapes, from the surf to the slopes to the desert, native splendor that has been molded by human actors for millennia. The epic sweep of these landscapes lends a visual breadth to the album that is echoed in the musical palette. Where Glow On thrived on its contrasting textures and tempos, Never Enough weaves them together into charged conversations.
Shabaka’s flute emerges out of the 94 intensely thrashing initial seconds of “Sunshower”, in which “I can’t feel a fuckin’ thing” becomes not a scream of numbness but an expression of joy and presence: “And this is where I wanna be.” Turnstile play in the pouring rain, and it’s clear that the power of the moment comes not just from the pounding water or the fluting sun, but from the inter-reliance enunciated in the title.
“Sunshower” is the second track in the extended six-song suite at the record’s core. It opens in the emotional isolation of “Dull”, peaks in “Look Out for Me”, the longest track they’ve ever done, and opens out into the inspired pairing (back in the day we would have called it the double A-side) of “Seein’ Stars” and “Birds”. “Dull” is set in a plush bedroom, with an 1980s-style beige touchtone office phone centered on a square table. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling with stuffed animals in an installation by Washington, DC, publisher, artist, and musician John Scharbach (a similar installation provides the set for Turnstile’s 2022 Tiny Desk concert).
In the video, the walls are blown out in slow motion, a visually gorgeous, sonically powerful burst of creative destruction that echoes Pink Floyd‘s The Wall along with countless high-tech slo-mo action scenes and also speaks to hardcore’s signature tough-tender utopian cynicism. Especially when the touchtone-dialed outro interiority of “Dull” explodes into the outdoor, rain-drenched performance of “Sunshower”.
The ringing guitar notes that open out of the flute to burst into the multiple textures of “Look Out for Me” shift Turnstile forcefully back to Baltimore and that same old Volvo station wagon we glimpsed snow-bound with Meg Mills in “Never Enough”. However, now it’s the setting for a couple of multiracial and multigenerational family groups to pile into before the camera cuts to an empty Wyman Park Dell, Yates singing on his own from the driver’s seat: “We’re standing in a line to disappear.”
There’s a glimpse of figures running through the woods surrounding the Dell, replaced by a synth wash leading into the three-minute outro introduced by DJ/singer/rapper/actor/producer Maestro Harrell voicing his character Randy Wagstaff’s dialogue from The Wire that gives the song its title: “You gonna look out for me? / You promise? / You got my back?” In season four’s climactic scene, the young teenage Randy both pleads with and accuses the Black police officer who had placed him in a foster home and promised to see him through his troubled adolescence.
As a house beat slowly builds over the synths, the Volvo drives down the street, and an unmarked black van pulls up behind it, lights flashing. It’s the closest the album gets to an overtly political commentary, channeling the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray in the back of a Baltimore police van, the inner-city violence of The Wire, and the current snatching of community members off the streets by unmarked, plainclothes ICE officers.
The song’s fading siren segues into the brief piano-flecked interlude of “Ceiling”, reverbed vocals plaintively singing “at the ceiling” before more of McCrory’s ringing guitar, sounding even closer to Andy Summers’, and Yates’s vocals, channeling Sting, break out the pop-R&B of “Seein’ Stars”. We could almost be in a lost Police song of the 1980s: “I fold / I fold / I fold.” However, the rhythm section is too heavy and too soulful, and the plangent guitar break just too emotionally resonant for the Police. Plus, the guest vocals from Hynes and Williams remind us we’re not listening to a New Wave trio; we’re in an indie-pop community in 2025.
That’s even more evident when “Birds” follows, a standout on a strong album. “Birds” packs at least three different songs into its pulsating two-and-a-half minutes. There’s the nearly minute-long drone segue out of “Seein’ Stars”, which the video brilliantly pairs with Fang’s foot pummeling the high-hat pedal over scattered percussion, building visual tension before the guitar and then drums finally explode into 30 seconds of the fastest thrash on the album, Yates shout-chanting “And you are free, free, free, free, free, free / No one left to be, be, be, be, be, be, be,” and the band letting loose on the rainbow-colored outdoor stage that witnesses nearly all of the truly collective moments throughout the album.
However, rather than another meditative outro, “Birds” shifts again, changing the tempo as bass and drums lock into a headbanging, pulse-pounding groove, and audience members dive gleefully into the crowd. Yates then bruisingly repeats, “Finally, I can see it / These birds are not meant to fly alone.” Given the mountains in the background, I’m presuming we’re back in SoCal, Turnstile expanding their reach along with its sound. This track, uniquely on the album, stops on a dime, into a brief silence, as the record winds down with the mid-tempo hardcore “Slowdive” (“sink into the feeling”), the melodic, melancholy pop-punk anthem “Time Is Happening” (“Circle back again / Lost my only friend”), and the enigmatic, synth-saturated ballad “Magic Man“.
That last pair wouldn’t have been out of place on the West Coast, either: the former borrows from late 1960s hippie-garage-pop and the latter, of course, bears the title of the debut single from the Wilson sisters’ Seattle-based band Heart, which pairs hard-rock guitars with a mini-Moog breakdown. However, perhaps the most intriguing shout-out on the album goes to the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead‘s 1972 benefit concert for the Kesey family dairy in Veneta, Oregon.
Although Deadheads versed in the acid-rock shredding of the band’s late 1960s live sets know better, the Dead still seem an unlikely touchstone here. Yet, the video of “Birds” opens on a colorful, long-haired guy blissfully dancing atop a scaffolding stage, right, precisely the spot where the guy Deadheads for decades have known as “naked pole guy” blissfully dances throughout “Bird Song” atop a stand of speakers. “I don’t know, but I believe / I found a song playing just for me,” Yates sings to open “Birds”.
What Turnstile describe about hardcore: “There’s a community that will check it out and have people support each other. … an open-minded place where people can just start a band and right away have a show and express yourself” (Fang, in Thrasher Magazine, 2017). “It’s like a universal vehicle you can drive no matter what; there’s no rules” (Lyons, in Thrasher Magazine, 2017); “There’s a freedom … As long as you’re singing about something you really care about, the audience will be able to listen and understand” (McCrory, in Hypebeast, 2023)—could just as well speak to, and may well have been cultivated by, the culture around the Dead and their shows. After all, “Birds” was one of three songs from Never Enough that the band previewed at a free concert in May at Baltimore’s Wyman Park Bandshell to raise money for the local charity “Health Care for the Homeless”.
“Bird Song” was written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter in memory of their close friend Janis Joplin (“All I know is something like a bird within her sang / All I know she sang a little while and then flew on”); it’s both mourning and joyful, a celebration of life and a recognition of the costs of living it. “I was told that love and death go hand in hand / When you find, is when you understand,” sings Yates on “Birds”, establishing an alternate lineage of pop music that cultivates community while preserving space for individual freedom and deep emotion. It’s a respite from the dull pressures and sharp torments of everyday life. Unlike those isolating moments in the opening of “Never Enough”, it’s meant to be sustaining and life-giving.
Still, Turnstile wisely change up any simple equations across the record, resisting any reduction of the hardcore moments to authenticity in contrast to the shallow and consumptive desires of commercial pop. After all, the video album features Mills throughout, even though she didn’t play on the album and presumably is not playing in the “studio” sequences, even though she is playing when the videos feature live performances.
I grew up during the genre-policing days of the 1960s and 1970s, when there was still such a thing as “selling out”. Disco was burned by rock DJs, and punks had to pretend they had grown up hating pop music. It’s refreshing that bands like Turnstile can openly embrace the cross-pollination that has always nurtured pop and indie music, regardless of their relationship to the mainstream. However, that doesn’t mean the questions raised by commercialism, fame, and selling out have disappeared. It just means bands and musicians have more tools available to them to try to make sense of them.
Turnstile’s public image and performance styles range from the recurring open-air, live-performance mosh pit in the visual album to the candy-striped backdrop to the telephone that opens “Dull” on that album, as also the Tonight Show performance of “I Care / Dull” that would not have been out of place in the glory days of Top of the Pops, Ed Sullivan, or Dick Clark. Lyons and Mills certainly would have been out of place, though. (Still, Sly and the Family Stone did appear on the more liberal Dick Cavett Show in 1970 performing “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)“—no wonder they merited a shout on Glow On’s “TLC (Turnstile Love Connection).”)
On The Tonight Show, Yates sports a moptop hairstyle and a zip-up turtleneck to complete the late 1960s pop vibe channeled by the jangly intro of “I Care”. Similarly, Lyons and Mills may be talented musicians; they’re also über-stylish eye candy. Compare this video to Turnstile’s appearance three years earlier, singing “Blackout” from Glow On, where everything about them screams straightforward power-punk, and it’s unmistakably live.
In “I Care/Dull”, the matching headphones work to persuade us they’re not actually lip-syncing, even as it’s hard to avoid that impression, especially in the power chords of the chorus. However, those headsets also neatly translate the isolation of the video for “Dull” into the context of a live-in-studio performance—the video-album track films them recording, headphone-clad, in the studio. They want to be safe and dangerous at the same time, or else they will eventually collapse the categories altogether, as they do with the set installation in the “Dull” video.
Doubtless, Turnstile know it’s never as simple as deconstructing binaries or exploding the goods that isolate them; they clearly want the resources available from stardom and embrace the role of pop icons. However, they equally clearly want just as much to carry with them into prosperity the rough-and-tumble local scenes that nurtured them into existence.
“The Greatest City in America” reads the stencil on a bench along the Baltimore street that “Look Out for Me” opens on. After decades of threading the needle, the Dead finally foundered on their refusal to give up the touring that supported their massive ‘family’ and their myriad fans, as they finally foundered in the arenas they were forced to play in when their following got too big, the drug culture that enabled the playing, and the world of pop music they saw as ever more corporatized.
How long Turnstile can balance on the edge they’ve found and where they’ve been thriving since Glow On remains to be seen; I hope they’re able to enjoy riding the wave as much as we will.