In 2018, few genres wrestle with the idea of purity the way hardcore does. In a music ecosystem that increasingly prizes fluidity, it is the rare space that still gamely flaunts its ideology as an asset, not a liability.

So what’s most striking about some of the bands that have found broad success in and out of the scene in recent years is their flexibility. In a realm where trying new things has roughly equated to trampling on history, there has been an increasing tolerance of innovation, especially from bands that are experts at the foundation.

Almost no band is more effective at this tightrope walk than Turnstile, a multiracial five-piece outfit from Baltimore with rigorous bona fides and an unerring instinct to color just beyond the lines in ways that unflamboyantly but purposefully illuminate the beauty of the lines themselves.

Image Turnstile’s second album is “Time & Space.”

“Time & Space” is its outstanding second album, just over 25 minutes long, and an urgent, clear and bruising statement of purpose. On the one hand, it is a pointed and accomplished straight-ahead hardcore album: fast, breathless, tingly. The guitarists Brady Ebert and Pat McCrory are concise and snarling. Take “Big Smile,” a 90-second howl and sprint, and the title track, only slightly longer — songs that barely veer from the genre’s blueprint.