✦✦✦✧ Turnstile’s third album takes the experimentation of its predecessor and makes it look safe and timid by comparison. Here, the post-hardcore quintet set out to see just how far they can push and expand the limits of the beloved genre that they have so faithfully served. Track after track is full of surprises and delights.

✦✦✧✧ This is Turnstile’s most experimental album to date, for good and for ill. The band shines most winsomely when they’re most clearly emulating their punk and metal heroes (especially Quicksand and Sick Of It All). The less straightforward tracks, alas, are all over the place, in a way that works against the album’s pacing, momentum, and cohesion.

★★★☆ Prong meets Sick Of It All meets Slayer meets 311 meets Helmet. And yet it works!  The album’s twelve tracks (27 minutes total!) each hold surprises for the listener, and every twist and turn feels surprising and fresh and youthful and fun. You do get the sense that this is an early record, to be supplanted in the near future with bigger and better; likely, the band’s embrace of nostalgic production values contributes in no small part to this feeling.