About 24 hours before he stepped onto the open-air stage to a screaming sea of punks, under one of the nation’s most post-carded landmarks, the Washington Monument, Brendan Yates was home in Baltimore icing his ankle.
The benefit show would mark the secret final stop on Turnstile’s autumn tour — the second tour promoting its 2025 album, “Never Enough,” which took home a Grammy in February for best rock album — and night after night of highly physical front manning had taken its toll on his joints. Despite announcing the Washington Monument show two weeks earlier, he had been planning it for over a year. He was determined to be ready.
Turnstile is, in 2026, the world’s biggest hardcore punk band by almost any measure — most streams, most awards, most genre-expansive sound (and perhaps most punk-purist detractors, who cringe at the band’s use of synth).
The band played its “Saturday Night Live” debut earlier this month, and last year, Yates made NPR Tiny Desk history as its first stage diver. It keeps finding itself on unique stages. Is that the impulse that led it to the Washington Monument?
“The show is at the steps of the nation’s capital, the center of the country in some ways,” Yates said on a video call. “But for us, this is kind of our home.”
Turnstile grew out of Baltimore’s punk scene, but Yates is from Burtonsville, Maryland, which splits the difference between Washington and Charm City. Like generations of D.C. punks, he grew up hooked on Bad Brains and Fugazi, and he still knows the best spots for a postshow jumbo slice.
“This is a scene that raised us,” he said. “Where we’re from inspires us most.”
Around 60,000 people attended Saturday’s show, according to organizers.
A flood of fans — some wearing Orioles jerseys or 9:30 Club T-shirts, declaring their geographic allegiances — made their way across the hilly lawn toward a barricaded area situated between the stage and the monument. Some sat on a stone wall near the walking path, drinking from bagged glass bottles or handing out political fliers.
Many passed Park Police officers on horseback and surveillance cameras President Donald Trump recently ordered and installed around the National Mall.
Nearly as soon as Turnstile drummer Daniel Fang began tip-tapping his high hat to open the band’s first song (“Birds”), mosh pits formed and collapsed into one another, waves of thrashing limbs in constant motion. Parents threw their kids onto their shoulders or grabbed their hands before jumping in, teaching them how to mosh, too.
The occasional crowd surfer tumbled overhead, and a circle pit included at least one backflip. The whole swell smelled of sweat.
“Today we’re here to gather around music to celebrate humanity,” Yates said from the stage. “But also to fight for it. Be loud enough for the White House to hear,” he yelled before leading the crowd in a pro-Palestinian chant, head turned toward the executive mansion a couple blocks away.
Before the show started on Saturday afternoon, Kelsey Darilus lounged on a blanket with her husband, Censay, and their 14-week-old daughter for “baby’s first punk show.”
Darilus said she was hooked on hardcore music after seeing Turnstile as a high-schooler in 2014. “Got my nose broken in the pit and have been going to punk shows ever since then,” she said.
The free concert, she said, felt like the perfect moment to introduce her daughter to the scene she loves — albeit a bit farther from the pit.
“The punk scene is exactly what you see here: Everyone coming together from all different backgrounds and supporting some type of cause,” she added. “She may not be able to understand now, but it’ll be a moment that we’ll have photos of and can talk about when she’s older.”
Like the hardcore musicians that came before him, Yates gives back to Baltimore’s and Washington’s music scenes (which, for what it’s worth, he said, share plenty of talent and fans) with free shows. But unlike its predecessors, Turnstile isn’t known for explicitly political lyrics, instead embodying a sort of benign apolitical nihilism in its songs.
To Yates, his music is a “reflection of the people that make it but equally so a reflection of the world around it,” he said. It also has to mirror the “struggles and the joy” of a vast and messy existence, he said.
After Turnstile became the first hardcore band to be recognized at the Grammys, it issued a statement speaking out against “heightened state violence” and forced displacement.
“This band has never been about the individual, but rather about a collective searching for a common thread in a world where those threads are being hidden from us,” the February statement said. “… We belong to nothing and we belong to everyone.”
Just before Turnstile took its retro rainbow stage, Hassan Wadi, global director of Human Concern International, announced the band’s fundraiser for humanitarian aid for Gaza, Sudan and Lebanon had reached $150,000, surpassing its initial goal by $100,000.
Aside from his brief interludes, Yates’s feet seemed to rarely touch the ground, ankle be damned. He spent much of the next 75 minutes in the air, leaping from amps and bouncing across the stage with a kind of raw intensity that old-school D.C. punks might recognize from a different hardcore performance under the monument’s shadow.
Protest concerts on the Mall became popular in the 1960s and ’70s at the Sylvan Theater, an outdoor amphitheater near the monument built originally as a stage for Shakespeare plays and military band concerts. They included an animal rights protest in 1988 with the B-52s and Natalie Merchant; and the anti-Iraq War Operation Ceasefire concert in 2005, headlined by Thievery Corporation, Le Tigre and Sweet Honey in the Rock.
The most famous, though, are probably a pair of Sylvan Theater concerts featuring hometown punk heroes Fugazi in 1993 and 1995. The earlier show brought around 5,000 people to the Mall, one of the largest crowds in the band’s history.
Before Turnstile, homegrown rocker Glitterer returned D.C. punk to the Mall after a three-decade dry spell last month with a stacked bill show benefiting local mutual aid. The show, meant to reclaim the space, was timed to the roughly first anniversary of Trump’s D.C. Safe and Beautiful task force arrival in Washington, organizers said at the time. Like Turnstile, they were inspired by Fugazi’s Sylvan Theater shows but weren’t trying to re-create them.
“I just view it as a public display of what we’re about,” Glitterer vocalist and bassist Ned Russin said in an email, adding that benefit shows are “a continuation of what D.C. punk always did.”
Because of crowd expectations, Turnstile set up its own stage instead of using the Sylvan. But the makeshift venue still met its capacity before the show began. Beyond the barriers, an overflow crowd formed its own mosh pit, kicking up a cloud of dust. Others outside the gate held banners. A pair walked by the monument carrying signs. “Abolish ICE,” read one. “Immigrants pay taxes. Billionaires don’t,” read the other.
Henry Bradley, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Kentucky, drove eight hours to see Turnstile at a venue so intertwined with punk history and protest.
“Punk has been pushed to the outcasts and stuff, but those are really the people who go to protests,” he said, crouching in the grass. “In a way, it’s a form of protest, standing up for what you care for, building a community of other people who care for somebody else.”
Eventually, the mosh pits stilled; golden light washed over the crowd. Yates hopped into the crowd, his ankle appearing fine, as he offered handshakes and hugs. All around him people in the audience embraced, too.
Juan Benn Jr., Meagan Flynn and Travis M, Andrews contributed to this report.
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