NEVER ENOUGH (2025) – TURNSTILE

An essay by Roman Rowe 🇬🇧

Some bands survive their scenes, and a few — very few — melt them down, reconfigure them, render them unrecognizable. From Nonstop Feeling (2015) to Glow On (2021), Turnstile had been a catalyst: an emotional centrifuge spinning hardcore, funk, pop, post-hardcore, and a kind of urban, almost new-age spirituality. But “Never Enough” (2025) isn’t continuity — it’s rupture. It’s the moment the band looks into the mirror of hardcore… and realizes it no longer owes anything to its reflection.

1. An Album That Breathes Light and Trauma

The cover — a washed sky, a pale rainbow, the absence of sharp edges — is a silent manifesto. Gone is the adolescent fury, the centrifugal urgency of Baltimore hardcore. Never Enough seems to ask: What happens when anger turns into vulnerability, when the mosh pit becomes a ritual of openness rather than impact?

The visual aesthetic anticipates the sound: a suspended hardcore, full of air, where distortion is not a weapon but a veil.

2. A Sonic Mutation: From Physical Hardcore to Atmospheric Hardcore

The interesting part isn’t that Turnstile has softened their edges — that would be a shallow reading — but how they reconfigure them. Here’s where musicology enters:

• “Never Enough” (opening track) feels like a secular sermon: wide percussion, expansive guitars, and a reverb aesthetic closer to Slowdive than Madball. It’s hardcore that floats.
• “Sole” carries the pop tension of Glow On but releases it into a minimalist, almost post-punk space.
• “I Care” is the emotional nucleus of the record: a radical gesture of honesty that earlier hardcore codes would have repressed. Turnstile bares their chest without fear of kitsch.
• “Dreaming” closes this initial arc by pulling the listener toward dreampop territory, proving that for the band “hardcore” is no longer a genre — it’s a root.

The production keeps the clarity and sensorial glow of Glow On but pushes it into more atmospheric terrain. You can feel the influence of producers who think of sound as landscape (in the Nigel Godrich lineage) rather than pure physical momentum.

3. Anthropology of Change: Turnstile and the Hardcore Community

From the perspective of subcultural anthropology, Never Enough becomes fascinating. Hardcore has always carried a moral code: intensity, resistance, community, honesty. Turnstile takes that code and translates it into the emotional language of the 21st century — a world where masculinity shifts, nostalgia weighs heavily, and vulnerability becomes political.

In Never Enough the band asserts:
hardcore doesn’t need to be hard to be true.

The hardcore community is divided. Purists see betrayal; others see evolution. But this tension is exactly what defines the cultural relevance of the record: Turnstile is updating the social contract of hardcore itself.

4. Philosophy & Aesthetics: Post-Hardcore as Post-Human

From an aesthetic-philosophical angle, the album embodies a postmodern question:
How do you express intensity without aggression?

Enter Deleuze and Guattari: Never Enough is a machine that deterritorializes hardcore. It lifts it out of its original geography, dismantles it, turns it into open space. There is a movement toward the Dionysian — but a gentle, luminous Dionysian, one without destruction.

In terms of critical theory, the album operates as a gesture against contemporary cynicism: a return to direct emotion, stripped of irony.

5. Transmedia: Turnstile as a Living Universe

The album doesn’t live only in its sound: it lives in the angelic minimalism of its cover, in the clean iconography, in the way fans reinterpret the record on social media, in the bodily aesthetic of live shows — where the mosh morphs into collective dance. This is an expanded album.

6. Conclusion: A New Emotional Grammar for Hardcore

Never Enough is not a record that seeks to please; it seeks to open. Open the genre, open emotional space, open the possibility of a hardcore that breathes.

Turnstile builds here a bridge:

• from noise to silence,
• from rage to light,
• from collision to embrace.

This is the kind of album that divides generations… and the kind that, years later, everyone points to as the beginning of something.

— Roman Rowe 🇬🇧