Turnstile is leaning in. With their fourth studio album, Never Enough, the Baltimore hardcore band aims to take the visceral immediacy that made their 2021 breakthrough, Glow On, so magnetic and blow it up to an even bigger scale.
The album is at its strongest when it leans into anthemic stadium rock, like “Sola,” with its psychedelic synth passages and a soaring refrain that feels tailor-made for arena singalongs, and “Dreaming,” which amplifies its triumphant energy by putting an unexpected twist on the Turnstile template: horns. Frontman Brendan Yates’s vocal glides effortlessly atop the tight chord progressions and shreddy guitar leads of “Light Design,” giving the song a tactile quality.
But while Turnstile has often benefited from pulling ideas from a wide range of genres, Never Enough finds them getting lost in the vastness of their influences. The first half of “Sunshower” rips through with an infectious freneticism before grinding to a halt with a disorienting flute solo that feels like it wandered in from another album. And “Dull” lives up to its name: a big, dumb rock song that isn’t quite big or dumb enough to be any fun. Co-producer A.G. Cook’s digital flourishes don’t add much to the track, leaving it feeling oddly stitched together.
The nearly seven-minute “Look Out for Me” teases a multi-part epic, veering into Baltimore club music, but tracks like that, “Time Is Happening,” “Magic Man,” and “Ceiling” (itself only a brief interlude) feel more like sketches than fully realized songs. Especially in Never Enough’s second half, it’s like the band is chasing ideas rather than committing to them—resulting in an album that fizzles out just when it feels that it should be reaching a fever pitch.
Turnstile’s vision comes through a bit clearer on the dance tracks “Seein’ Stars” and “I Care,” the latter of which playfully leaps back and forth between a jangly Johnny Marr-esque verse and a darker chorus. But while the album’s arrangements, performances, and production feel considered to a tee, its melodies and riffs are underdeveloped or overly familiar. That the breakdown in “Birds” echoes the main riff of “Look Out for Me” feels unintentionally repetitive.
Turnstile’s ambition to grow and continue stretching their sound is admirable. Glow On was a calculated evolution of 2018’s Time & Space, a level-up that hit a sweet spot between pop polish and punk punch. Never Enough follows that same impulse, and when it works, the band sounds huge, confident, and creatively restless. But too often its big swings don’t always land a clean hit.
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Taking ‘Looking Out for Me’ as an example – in the intro I hear Frankie Goes to Hollywood/Trevor Horn, Berlin-era Bowie/Eno, Andy Summers Police-esque Walking on the Moon guitar, sweeping generic power cords (Green Day?), then the vocal kicks in – and it is this last element I can ‘t quite place. Multi- tracked, processed, verging on innocuous. Followed by Rage in the Machine’s Zach de la Rocha in the chorus? On one hand the sum of the parts makes for quite pleasant rifftastic stadium rock, but, I can’t help focussing on the bits of the aural jigsaw rather than the completed picture.