NEVER EUGH The turnstile came out on Friday after months of waiting, chatter and gossip about the possibility or not that this album, the fourth for the Baltimore band, represented the moment when the hardcore became – Ahem – mainstream. In an era in which the urgency is also communication strategy and breakdown can end up in the Reel with motivational subtitles, NEVER EUGH He arrived with the strength of a generational slogan and the fragility of a strategy made to explode in the instant, now aware that the difficult one comes later.
The construction strategy of this “inevitable great leap” has affected fans for months. The titles here and there traced the route. The turnstiles would have been the group on which to focus in 2025, reporting concepts such as sincerity, emotion, urgency in an unpublished container beyond the circle of fans. In a hardcore word. Then of course the speech is more complex than that, but let's start from here so we understand each other.
First of all the context. The turnstiles come from Baltimore, a city that is 60 kilometers from Washington DC and that according to the logics of the Americans, make it a single urban area. The band therefore fits into a context that the hardcore punk does not only have it in DNA, but has seen it born and therefore those who arrive from there must meet the accounts with a story that includes people like Fugazi and Bad Brains. After a apprenticeship made up of many concerts that led them to be a sort of local flag (in a recent video that they published on YouTube you see them playing in front of a crowd in a park in their hometown), the turnstiles began to be part of the Great Giro.
NEVER EUGH From this point of view the work started with GLOW ON of 2021 For some it is evil, especially if you refer to concepts of punk orthodoxy and things like that. The record, however, works very well, too too much. Every second seems to want to communicate perfectly what he wants to say. No second readings. No hidden meanings. No stratification. In addition, a production that seems closer to the M83 than not, like, to the Refused (to say of a hardcore group that flirted with multiple genres). Moved parts, very clean riffs, melodic openings from therapeutic pop-punk, and that desire to say “we can do it” even when the only sensible thing would be surrender.
There is an epic idea inside this album and it is not the first time obviously that the genre approaches the epic. Take, if we want to be good, the … and you will know by the trail of Dead or, if we want to be less good, the My Chemical Romance. Most of all, in NEVER EUGH There is that hunger for totality that belongs to these years: a record as a moodboard, as an open archive of references, without hierarchies. Hardcore, Emo, Ambient, Featuring Giusti (from Shabaka to Hayley Williams of Paramore), passages that could like the 1975 listeners with the Slayer shirt taken by Primark.
The creeping feeling is that behind the reasons for the functioning of NEVER EUGH There is precisely this adherence to the “gesture”, to the “stylization” which in itself contains a little all the speech. It works because it comes to those who don't know and maybe don't want to know. And here the point for which many operation will not go down to many: nobody will make a culture listening to turnstiles. Nobody will end up recovering the Fugazi or Hüsker Dü. And perhaps this is precisely the reason for success: there is no need to know anything. There is not a first one. There is no after. There is only now.
In a sense, NEVER EUGH It is a perfect disc for the time. Not because it is epochal, but because it reflects the impossibility of choosing what to leave out. He is a sonic blender, quite energetic and great impatient, who takes everything he can and returns it to gusts. No synthesis. No penalty. A low intensity aesthetic bombardment. But in an era where consistency is experienced as rigidity, this chaos works as a sign of vitality, freshness and ambition. It is not necessarily evil. But it is the sign that the old lenses – historical, critical, even emotional – are becoming unsuitable to read the present.
So yes, let's get ready: we'll see them everywhere. Festival, advertising, big stages. They will become the hardcore band for those who have only heard the hardcore. And at the recent spring sound despite a set placed at 3 in the morning (perhaps to allow them to arrive directly from New York where they had the press conference to present the disc) attracted a lot of people who poga as if we actually seeing vintage videos of the Black Flag. A sign that the thing works and has also felt.
The turnstiles do not come from the past. They don't speak to the future. They speak to a timeline without memory and without direction. Maybe it will be the band of these years, maybe it's all a gigantic teasing and everything will deflate. The fact is that those who see them live remains impressed by the power, intensity and physicality they transmit. Something that is so the legacy of a story, but which communicates well beyond the container-Disco also and above all to those who do not know this story and has never intercepted it. Considering the need we have of physical places, meeting spaces and music that communicates even at this level, this could be the added element that bring the turnstiles, that return to one togetherness of which there is a desperate need.
