Albums
NEVER ENOUGH
2025
Genre: Rock
Release Date: 2025
By Nina Corcoran
Reviewed June 5, 2025
With a features list that reads like a festival lineup, the sprawling remix edition of the Baltimore band’s 2025 album demonstrates there’s almost nowhere its songs can’t go.
It’s been little more than a year since Turnstile released Never Enough, the Baltimore peri-hardcore band’s fourth album, and their first since 2021’s Glow On brought them to mainstream attention. They’ve steadily been stacking the kinds of wins commensurate with a band at their level. Taco Bell drafted their double A-side “Seein’ Stars”/”Birds” for a commercial featuring Tony Hawk; bassist Franz Lyons was the face of a Guess Jeans campaign. “Never Enough” became their first Alternative Airplay chart-topper, while Never Enough won a Grammy for Best Rock Album. “Birds” also won for Best Metal Performance—sure, it’s not metal, but there’s no surer sign of a successful crossover than an inexplicable Grammy win.
Except, maybe, getting your album reworked. Never Enough: Versions is Turnstile’s take on the remix album, making them the latest members of a club that includes Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, and Paramore. Versions shares some of the same guests—A.G. Cook, Julien Baker, Panda Bear—with those latter two, and adds a Hayley Williams solo turn for good measure. The full list of credits reads like a festival lineup, one where the local luminaries (Baltimore club godhead Rod Lee, jazz trumpeter and composer Brandon Woody, Maryland death metal legends Dying Fetus) have been booked with as much thoughtfulness as the headliners.
Versions also sounds like a festival: not just in the breadth of genres, but in the sequencing. While Never Enough’s shaggier patches could come across a bit haphazard—gentle stretches of synth or flute interrupting the action like mindfulness breaks—it’s nothing compared to listening to Versions straight through. To go from Panda Bear’s take on the AM gold “Magic Man”—which sounds like Billy Joel writing a Baltimore club track on molly—to Dying Fetus’ gleefully brutal mugging of “Birds” is the kind of experience usually reserved for carrying three tallboys across a city park at 2 p.m. (Death metal chops aside, Dying Fetus hew pretty closely to Turnstile’s original arrangement, which might be a letdown for anyone with fond memories of John Gallagher’s old beatdown/rapcore side project Knuckle Deep.) A.G. Cook’s “Dull” follows Dying Fetus, and though the hyperpop icon absolutely matches the intensity level (imagine a digital-hardcore jock jam pounded out on an MPC), he’s chased by Hayley Williams’ blissed-out “Ceiling.”
On a conceptual level, the Cook/Williams juxtaposition makes some sense: two pop artists setting aside their stylistic tendencies to tug at a very specific thread. For Cook, it’s the limbic pleasure of a hardcore breakdown. For Williams, it’s the chance to show her good friends and personal Fugazis what can happen if you commit to the crossover. Turnstile’s original “Ceiling” was essentially an interlude, a minute-long bit of connective tissue between the Baltimore-club holding pattern of “Look Out for Me” and the hazy new wave strut of “Seein’ Stars.” Over a bed of sustained electric piano tone, a pitched-up Brendan Yates chirps a complaint that wouldn’t be out of place on Turnstile’s debut EP: “Something in the way that you’re staring into me has got me blinded/On me when I change, on me when I stay the same, and I’m reminded.” It’s like a photonegative of a hardcore song. Williams sees that inversion, and raises it: Her “Ceilings” is a gorgeous torch song, a balearic trip down the river that refashions the original’s lyrical strictures into a lover’s comfy tee.
In hindsight, the unfinished nature of “Ceilings” lent itself well to an overhaul. Not every pairing offers the same possibilities. Faye Webster discards the Police pastiche of “I Care” for a comfier, bossa nova-inflected pop-rock stroll. But the text is so garishly sarcastic that Webster—one of our finest working ironists—can’t quite finesse her way in. Julien Baker and Mustafa are similarly stranded by “Time Is Happening,” a downcast slab of pop-punk that they’ve reworked as a maudlin slowcore duet. No stranger to spinning lyrical straw into pop gold, superstar emeritus and ball-knower Elton John recorded “Seein’ Stars” as a duet, in a fashion: He grafts his rollicking piano and impressively fiery bellow onto Turnstile’s original. The result is surprisingly moving: not a passing of the torch, but a tenderly shared cigarette outside the disco.
Versions’ electronic musicians, as you’d expect, perform their traditional remix-abum functions. (Dan Deacon’s “Dreaming” is the exception, a typically wide-eyed cover featuring his patented galloping triplet kicks, plus screaming angels.) Floating Points envisions “Sole” as a peak-time techno epic, cloning the topline melody for strings. Incredibly, “Look Out for Me”—which has a screamo-adjacent chorus and a riff straight out of Battle of Los Angeles—went to a DJ, twice: Ireland’s Kettama turns in a dutiful techno treatment that suggests his collaborations with Underworld, just without the artful detours. Four Tet (who’s been spinning Floating Points’ “Sole” for a while now) lifts the bassline for a progressive house remix that’s… fine, the sort of thing you’d toss together if you found yourself co-headlining the same festival night.
In a minor upset, it’s not the DJs who alchemize something new from Never Enough: It’s the jazz musicians. Brandon Woody expands BadBadNotGood’s ska-punk brass hook from “Dreaming” into a third-stream voyage, while Shabaka Hutchings (who provided new age flute on Never Enough) morphs into an amphetamine reptile on the pummelling “Slowdive,” which splits the difference between post-bop and post-hardcore with a guillotine.
It’s to the band’s credit that Hutchings’ contribution is just one of several “let ’em cook” spots on Versions. Turnstile’s particular blend of ambition and self-effacement can be frustrating: They have an ample supply of hooks, but they tend not to catch onto anything specific. Whenever a Versions guest bends the source material to their own devices, it’s like a dare begging to be answered. The biggest dare, as it turns out, comes from Nourished by Time, the Baltimore-raised bedroom musician who’s earned a reputation as a kind of hypnogogic GTA radio station: a silk-shirt savant. His take on “Sunshower” discards almost everything save a single pitched-up phrase (“And this is where I wanna BE!”) and Lyons’ juddering bassline. Over this skeletal framework, he shakes a tambourine and croons about speeding cars and escape. The result is ethereal yet propulsive: a street-skate daydream.
Glow On had that same confident recklessness, which is why it’s a hardcore classic. Every Latin groove, drumline breakdown, and 311 homage arrived fully metabolized: a front-to-back set of surprises unveiled with the casual ease of flicking a water bottle over an overheated audience. If Never Enough felt like a drawdown from hardcore, Versions suggests the pullback is nearly complete. Only Justice Tripp’s Angel Du$t (a band he co-founded with Turnstile drummer Daniel Fang and guitarist Pat McCrory) plants a hardcore flag in a vast field of indie rockers and electronic-music producers. The sprawling scope of Versions suggests that Turnstile considers Never Enough a kind of late-stage American songbook, a catalog sturdy enough to sustain all comers. As good as Versions is at its most audacious, it’s a bummer that the next generation of hardcore iconoclasts wasn’t given a swing at it.