The excitement generated around the Baltimore band Turnstile since the release of its fourth album, Never Enough, in June is best summarized by the review headline in Metal Hammer magazine declaring it “Hardcore’s answer to Nevermind.”
Taken literally, a chorus of “Wait, what?” is only sensible. The popularity Nirvana gained at stupefying speed and unmanageable proportions in 1991 is impossible to replicate in the culture and music industry of 2025. Nor is that a trajectory Turnstile is seeking. Its rise has been a gradual — you might say, brand-maximizing — momentum from a drummer’s side project in 2010 to its present culmination in prestige festival slots, Grammy nominations, performances on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and collaborations with shoe brand Converse.
On the other hand, as a hyperbole of critical consensus around it and of wider aspirations on its behalf, the sentiment is harder to argue against. Never Enough is not only Turnstile’s best-reviewed album, but also its bestselling. It debuted at ninth on the Billboard 200, three spots down from, of all things, My Chemical Romance’s 2004 album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. By the looks of it, news of rock music’s slow and painful death under ever-widening pop hegemony is greatly exaggerated. The air is being cleared, and people are breathing it afresh. All it took was to revive a subgenre of punk that, for years, was thought moribund even within punk, infusing it with new wave hooks, mountainous effects, ambient synth soundscapes, and also flutes. More distinctive than the added ingredients is its size. The album is vast, a world unto itself, and taking all-comers; something that could hardly be said of its root genre, which could be insular in the extreme. So it’s worth asking if Turnstile is, if not appropriating a formula, mutating it beyond recognition.
Hardcore is punk’s kid brother, emerging from its wreckage in the 1980s. Punk is urban, decadent, and indifferent; hardcore is suburban, disciplined, and deadly earnest. As the container of our culture’s internal contradictions, including dogmatism and pragmatism, individualism and communitarianism, and Biercean indignation and Emersonian transcendence, hardcore is as American as atomic warfare. As the backbone of the American indie underground, it is a reliable incubator of talent. Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, Dave Grohl, and Henry Rollins all started out in rudimentary hardcore bands.
Hardcore is usually seen as a springboard to maturity despite a pattern of evolution over its four-decade history. Any hardcore band that thinks they’ve concocted a new wheel design shouldn’t be surprised that Bad Brains already holds multiple patents. Even the use of wind instruments is not original to Turnstile; Gorilla Biscuits beat it to it with a harmonica solo on “Start Today” in 1989. Rather, it’s hardcore’s spirit that hasn’t changed, resisting mainstream attention with consistent stubbornness.
Descending into a basement or crowding into a VFW hall, a bowling alley, or even a Denny’s has an almost monastic aura. You are deliberately exiting the world to exchange ideas or encounter modes of expression entirely absent elsewhere. This is evident enough, watching the recorded evidence of hardcore shows in the mid-1990s now available on YouTube. Chaotic and dissonant, made more so by degraded VHS documentation, it reveals itself as a forgotten history of a dark, predigital age. The dogmatic connotations are not, I think, out of bounds. Much of Ian MacKaye’s progressive moralism comes from his Episcopal upbringing. Even miscreants like Steve Albini had purist creeds of conduct.
Turnstile is in keeping with that spirit, but in an evangelical rather than monastic way. The band gains converts through immersion rather than instilling commitment through instruction or discourse. It is immaculate in its craft. Turnstile produces its own records and directs its own music videos. It made videos for each song on Never Enough and released them as a film in theaters. The band’s live shows are no less intricate and energetic. In anticipation of the album’s release, it played a free, secret show in Wyman Park in Baltimore. As a benefit for the homeless, it was very much a callback to the ethic when Fugazi did canned food drives. And the band documented it on VHS. But the spirit was unmistakably modern. The genre so long seen as the dominion of white males melted the identity divide into the energy of the crowd. Where Turnstile goes, a rainbow coalition follows.
That modernity has its downsides. While ’90s hardcore bands regarded the internet with wariness at best, Turnstile is nothing if not a creature of the digital. As are its fans. People in the mosh pit appear to be outnumbered by glowing smartphones. And for all the band’s energy onstage, there is an underlying theatrical, almost aloof quality in the spectacle it provides. It is the relationship between observer and observed rather than messenger and recipient, or even mutual participants. The audience of a straight-edge band may be subject to a sermon on animal rights. People seeing Coalesce may catch its guitarist smashing his instrument before the first song ends.
Turnstile’s own message is comparably simpler, where it is not murky. Its political agnosticism is seen, uncommonly, as a merit for loftier aims. In the words of Pitchfork, the band embraces “what it means to be yourself.” In this, Turnstile takes from such self-affirming, introspective hardcore bands as Turning Point, Dag Nasty, and Snapcase. Yet its schematic lyricism fails to entirely leave its predecessors’ shadows. Listeners can discern emotions in songs such as “I CARE,” “SOLE,” and “BIRDS” in the same way that they can discern Thomas Jefferson in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.
“Standing in the corner with the things I never said,” says part of a verse in “LOOK OUT FOR ME,” “Not a lot of reason when your brain’s gone to your head.”
ANDREA DWORKIN’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The songs in and of themselves can stand ably alongside any in the hardcore pantheon. But they lose propulsion with a vibes-based, notes app-to-tape profundity that seems to echo experience and validate already present feelings, something closer to pop punk, rather than to provoke thought or action, or dispel apathy. Or even just to have something to say, in the vein of the visceral screeds of Glassjaw, the macabre monologues of Drowningman, or the esoteric wordplay of At the Drive-In.
I don’t want to say that the hardcore I grew up with at the turn of the millennium, let alone the hardcore that came before it, was better than Turnstile’s, Title Fight’s, or Gouge Away’s. Only that in an information-scarce, disconnected world, it had different advantages. We, as listeners, were more reliant on its guidance and its imagination. Hardcore bands, in turn, expected more of us to be active interlocutors and not passive consumers; ideally, to leave a show better people than when we came into it. Turnstile and its fans, shaped by information abundance and over-connection, speak practically a different language. And because hardcore never talked down to me, I wouldn’t talk down to it if I could help it. The one constant between us, however, is that in the ever-shifting conflict between youth and everything else, punk is the one reliable mediator, whether as teacher, friend, or therapist. The challenge is to discover which form is most necessary for you.
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @cr_morgan.
