With their 2025 release “Dull,” Turnstile continues their transformation from hardcore firebrands into architects of emotional nuance. Best known for reviving punk’s corporeal thrill in the past decade, the Baltimore-based band now turns inward. Featured on their latest album Never Enough, “Dull” is less a departure than a meditation—a murmured hymn from the margins of consciousness. It is a track about absence, detachment, and the strange beauty of feeling nothing at all.
Lyrical Disquiet: When Words Become Weight
“Deep in the night / I’m waiting for the call.” From its opening, “Dull” declares its stillness. These lines are not merely placeholders—they carry the tension of anticipation that never resolves. The speaker, suspended in time, scans the void for meaning, for a signal. Yet the refrain—“Won’t be surprised by anything at all”—echoes like a quiet collapse, a surrender to emotional flatline.
Turnstile has always excelled at physicality—music made to move bodies. But here, they stand still. The lyrical language of “Dull” is spare, reduced almost to fragments. In that minimalism lies its power. Each word is soaked in a quiet dread, a sense of waiting for something that may never come. There’s a numbness threaded through the lines, not from ignorance but from overload. This is emotional anesthesia—self-preservation by way of withdrawal.
Sonic Textures: From Muscle to Murmurs
If GLOW ON cracked open the door to melodic experimentation, Never Enough walks through it fully—and “Dull” stands at its center. The band’s once-pure punk chassis is now layered with synth pads, processed vocal loops, and ghostlike textures. The track opens not with guitars, but with air—an ambient swell that feels like it was recorded inside a sensory deprivation tank. Brendan Yates’ voice enters not as a roar but a whisper filtered through digital fog.
This is not to say that the song lacks structure. There’s rhythm here—percussion stirs beneath the surface like distant thunder—but it is softened, buried. The guitars drift more than drive. In one striking section, subtle glitch effects warp the vocal track, distorting Yates’ voice into something alien and affectless. Even the drums—typically Turnstile’s spine—feel hesitant, like footsteps in a dream.
It’s a calculated dissociation. The production mirrors the song’s internal world—one where boundaries blur, where nothing quite touches. In the palette of “Dull,” Turnstile trades sweat for atmosphere, immediacy for inertia.
Performance: A Stillness That Moves
When Turnstile performed “Dull” live on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the staging itself became part of the message. Gone were the fevered jumps and cathartic flourishes. Instead, the band stood in a pale wash of light, bathed in blues and greys. Yates held the microphone like it might disappear. His delivery was more mantra than proclamation—slow, almost ghostlike. Bassist Franz Lyons and guitarist Pat McCrory mirrored that mood, weaving subtle harmonic drones rather than punk crunch.
Yet the performance wasn’t devoid of emotion—it radiated a kind of exhausted intimacy. The crowd didn’t mosh; they swayed. It felt like a wake for a feeling long since buried. The silence between verses became part of the rhythm. For a band rooted in motion, this moment of near-immobility became its own kind of drama.
Critics responded accordingly. Pitchfork praised the track for “conveying ache without eruption,” while Rolling Stone described it as “Turnstile’s boldest choice yet—a song that dares to say nothing loudly.” Among fans, reactions were mixed, but not indifferent. On forums and fan pages, some called it haunting, others disoriented by its restraint. But no one dismissed it. In today’s maximalist music culture, restraint becomes its own rebellion.
Context: Hardcore’s New Interior
“Dull” doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it arrives at a time when many punk-rooted bands are confronting the limitations of genre. Just as Title Fight pivoted to dream-pop and Ceremony veered toward post-punk, Turnstile’s current phase feels like a conscious embrace of the inward turn. But unlike others, they carry their origins with them. Even at its most ambient, “Dull” pulses with the residue of hardcore urgency—it’s just been diluted, decelerated, deconstructed.
The track also reflects a broader generational tone. In a cultural moment saturated by overstimulation and burnout, numbness has become a common affect. “Dull” doesn’t glamorize that state—it recognizes it, embodies it, holds it up like a mirror. In this way, Turnstile becomes not just a band, but a vessel for collective malaise. And through this shared numbness, oddly, a new connection is formed.
The Art of Feeling Less
“Dull” is not an anthem. It is not a climax or a declaration. It’s a whisper from behind the curtain, a quiet spell cast in the middle of a noisy room. In embracing detachment, Turnstile paradoxically achieves a deeper intimacy. The song doesn’t explode—it lingers. It stretches a moment of pause into something that feels almost sacred.
For a band once defined by velocity and defiance, “Dull” shows immense courage. It resists the urge to fill space. It allows silence to speak. And in doing so, it redraws the map of what hardcore can be—not just a sound of resistance, but a sound of resignation, reflection, and emotional recursion.
If Never Enough is Turnstile’s descent into new territory, then “Dull” is the foothold at the bottom—quiet, tremulous, and deeply human. In its refusal to roar, it resonates even louder.
