Having sedimented its place among the planet’s most closely scrutinized rock bands, the Baltimore outfit continues to dismantle the codes of hardcore with a remix album inviting Oklou, Alex G, Hayley Williams as well as Four Tet, Elton John, Slayyyter, and Panda Bear.
What to do with the success of Never Enough (2025) and an exponential ascent that nothing seems able to stem? Push it even further. There were indeed a few reservations about the expansion of their hardcore sound (synthetic flourishes, overly obvious choruses, and the spread of electronic detours), but Brendan Yates and his bandmates – crowned with two Grammys – see no kind of contradiction in it.
For the Baltimore group, hardcore is more than a set of aesthetic and sonic codes; it is an ethos that extends to anyone willing to respect it and adopt it. That was already the lesson at the heart of Glow On (2021) – and its Alien Love Call shared with Blood Orange –, predecessor to Never Enough that pushed the reflection even further. But nothing in the proportions as extreme as this remix disc, Never Enough: Versions.
Mind you, can Elton John be hardcore? A front flip at an Oklou concert is it socially acceptable? Are Panda Bear and Four Tet sensitive to screams? With results necessarily contrasting, the answer to these faction-war questions is resolutely and invariably “Yes”. Purely hardcore with Angel Du$t (the former group of Brendan Yates, Pat McCrory and Daniel Fang), gently bossa nova with Faye Webster, electroclash with Slayyyter, ambient-inflected with Oklou or Chanel Beads, jazz with Brandon Woody, soft rock with Hayley Williams, the remixes of Never Enough open an extension of the hardcore realm.
Hardcore Until Death
More than a catalog of influences or friendships, Never Enough: Versions invites their (more or less) contemporaries to confront their vision of the genre. For the sublime versions by Blood Orange, Faye Webster or Mustafa and Julien Baker (or even the curious and discoid Seein’ Stars with Sir Elton John), the stakes lie in melody and arrangement, but others take winding paths.
A.G. Cook overlays the extreme guitars of hardcore with the metallic and derealizing beats of hyperpop, the Baltimore Club legend Rod Lee makes it a vernacular question, Porches and Nourished By Time, for their part, find radicality in the starkness and harshness of the genre, while Oklou or Panda Bear amplify the euphoria of hardcore into hypnotic and relentless motifs. Hardcore for everyone, and everyone for hardcore.
Never Enough: Versions (Roadrunner Records). Has been out since August 28.
