On a nostalgic drive through Turnstile’s Baltimore hometown last month, the band’s workaholic frontman, Brendan Yates, pointed out an empty lot that looked like the eroded remnants of a loading dock where the band once played a show. A few days later, on a giant stage in the California desert, Charli XCX proclaimed it would be a “Turnstile Summer” on a huge screen during her Coachella set.
Over the past 15 years, Turnstile has blown up from local hardcore heroes to one of the most popular punk bands of its era. Though the group emerged from a world of aggressive music, it cycles through genres — dream-pop, alternative rock — often over the course of one song. That chaos, along with a striking emotional depth, is in its ethos.
“There is something exciting about being able to make music in a way where there’s no formula, there’s no expectation,” Yates, 36, said. The band’s 2021 album, “Glow On,” propelled it from the upper echelons of the underground into a dramatically larger landscape that included TV commercials, Grammy nominations and a spot opening for Blink-182’s arena tour. With a new album, “Never Enough,” due June 6, Turnstile is pushing its sound further, and the stages are set to get even bigger, leading to an inevitable question: Can the group retain its magic (and its mission) as it grows?
In the late afternoon, four of the band’s five members jammed into the guitarist Pat McCrory’s car for a drive soundtracked by a Robert Palmer deep cut and a lot of sighs about the ongoing gentrification of Baltimore. They stopped at Red Thorn Tattoo, and were surprised to find it closed. Yates, McCrory, the drummer Daniel Fang and the bassist Franz Lyons, outfitted in a selection of hoodies and baseball caps, peered through the window. (Meg Mills, a new addition who plays guitar, was back home in the United Kingdom.)
Fang, 35, whose soft-spoken, slight presence belies his ferocity as a drummer, explained that over a decade ago, the storefront was a music venue known as the Charm City Art Space that hosted hardcore shows. When he was in high school, he was inadvertently shoved to the ground while moshing there, leaving him bloody and with a chipped tooth. In spite of that — or possibly because of it — he had a great time. His mother panicked when she picked him up, then was “overjoyed” that he’d found his people. Fang relayed this origin story as though he were a pastor outlining the moment he found religion. For him, the seeds that would grow into Turnstile had been sown.
Hardcore, an outgrowth of 1980s punk rock with screamed vocals and screeching guitars, is an apt mirror for young adulthood — a limbo stage that is fertile ground for creative expression. The genre’s overarching ethos is one of self-determination, and its underground nature breeds a do-it-yourself mind-set that often follows hardcore fans well into their adult lives.
“Hardcore music in general can be about grief, sadness, anger, happiness, joy, triumph. It can be all of those things, but I feel like it always presents as something that makes you feel good,” Yates said, speaking with the coolly zealous delivery of a longtime yoga devotee. “The heaviness and the aggression are a healthy way to process some of those feelings that humans naturally have. I think if you don’t have something like that in your life, it might come out in more destructive ways.”
Fang and Yates, who’d grown up in the Maryland suburbs listening to Beastie Boys, Nirvana, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Soundgarden, became close when both attended Towson University. In 2010 they started Turnstile with Lyons and two guitarists, Sean Cullen and Brady Ebert, who left the band in 2015 and 2022. As they told the story of these early days — dotted with ample bruises and crippling stage fright — the local tour continued.
The Royal Blue, a newish pub that replaced what Lyons called “an epic gay bar” where Charm City concertgoers retreated to relieve themselves in relative cleanliness, displays dozens of Charm City fliers under plexiglass on the bar. Yates, who does not drink, unsuccessfully attempted to order a Shirley Temple (no grenadine) and read through the bills, tracking Turnstile from one show, where it appears at the bottom of the lineup, to another, a few years later, at the top. For some time, that’s where it remained — one of the most beloved bands in the insular world of hardcore, known for hyper-energetic live shows where Lyons and the extremely limber Yates are often airborne, aloft above crowds teaming with stage divers.
Its musical ambitions eventually exploded into public view. In 2015, after a decade of producing largely taut, brief songs, it released the beefy, angry “Nonstop Feeling”; the high energy “Time & Space,” which experimented with psychedelic sounds, arrived three years later on the stalwart rock and metal label Roadrunner, where the band has remained.
Turnstile was perpetually touring, a lifestyle that was sidelined by coronavirus lockdowns. So the group quarantined together, and in summer 2020, when it came time to start writing its next album, decamped to Tennessee to record with the producer Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Linkin Park, Fiona Apple). “We spent day and night around each other, kicking ideas and making a record,” Lyons, 37, said, sitting with the band in Fang’s sparsely decorated living room with Mills, 28, on a video call. “We didn’t even know what was going to be on the other side.”
The answer was “Glow On,” a breakthrough album that reached No. 30 on the Billboard 200. Its 15 songs are anchored by freight-train guitar work and scream-along refrains, but the album has ample pockets of melody, and Yates sings as much as he yells, his reverb-treated voice lifting to the heavens. “New Heart Design,” with its tropical rhythm and Yates’s yearning lilt, sounds as if it might have been on the “Breakfast Club” soundtrack. “Eighteen years and ain’t it funny how it feels when you start to find out life’s real,” Yates sings, highlighting one of the album’s central preoccupations, the cruel, ceaseless march of time.
“I love that in musicians and artists, when they’re OK to put themselves in a little bit of discomfort in order to learn something and grow in a different direction,” said Hayley Williams of Paramore, a fan of the band who appears on the new LP. “They’ve stayed true to where they’ve come from, never forgot any of that, but aren’t afraid to be ambitious and try different things.”
The album’s good-natured bombast garnered fans from the upper echelons of heavy music like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and Metallica’s James Hetfield, and more unexpected boldfaced names like Demi Lovato and Miguel. Post-Covid, they toured relentlessly, finding themselves on enormous outdoor festival stages where their mega riffs entranced crowds otherwise there to see Diplo and take ’shrooms. “Glow On” connected on a grand scale because it bottles the essence of hardcore — the energy and fever that drew Turnstile in as teens — and channels it through an arena rock sound. It doesn’t feel inauthentic or cheap, but broad and curious.
Still, scenes have growing pains, and when a hardcore band attempts evolution, some fans can grow rowdy. “Anytime you put out something new, you lose a bunch of people,” Yates said. “You kind of just embrace it.”
Williams dismissed any potential downsides to Turnstile’s ascendance: “They can be as giant as they want, because I think the spirit of hardcore is in them,” she said.
“Never Enough” is the result of a group of musicians assuredly pushing themselves forward: It is a massive-sounding record, confidently exploratory. There are plenty of hardcore moments, but the album features more of Yates’s yearning vocals and McCrory’s soaring guitar solos, while Lyons and Fang explore the outer limits of funk and heaviness. (Fang credits somatic therapy for linking his mind and body, and Lyons has been taking lessons with the bass wizard Joe Lally of Fugazi).
“The music we make is not necessarily defined by the sounds, it’s defined by the people,” Yates said. “If the music is not reflective of the people, then what is it?”
The album includes pop-soul (“Seein’ Stars”), a classic pop-punk ripper (“Time Is Happening”) and “Dull,” which might technically qualify as thrash metal. The six-and-a-half-minute “Look Out for Me” includes both a house music outro and an actor from “The Wire” reprising dialogue from an emotional scene. As Lyons put it, “There’s mad flavors on that record.”
And while the band is shifting its sound further from hardcore, it remains rooted in the tenets it preaches: respect for yourself, for your audience, for your bandmates, for an unflinching effort to induce catharsis.
“The reason that I was drawn to hardcore in the first place was to express yourself exactly the way you want,” Yates said. “Sometimes all you want is to be punched in the face,” McCrory, 36, added.
While the music gleefully leaps between vibes, the main lyrical through line is melancholy. On “Time Is Happening,” Yates sings of how he “lost my only friend.” On “Sunshower,” he’s “right where I wanna be,” but “can’t feel an [expletive] thing.” On “Light Design,” Yates admits he has to “hold his head and cry.” Either this is a tough period for him, or all periods are tough.
“I’ll watch, like, ‘Glee’ and cry over a song,” he said with the reluctant acceptance of a man who has made peace with his tears. “At a certain moment, I’ll be like, ‘Why am I crying right now? I don’t even know.’”
Yates was willing to discuss overarching narratives — love, loss, desire — but clammed up about specifics: “At the end of the day, you can’t control how anyone takes anything, so why even try?”
Still, trying — hard — is at the heart of Turnstile. Yates produced the album and, with McCrory, directed a video for every song. After making three expansive, color-saturated videos for “Glow On,” he decided to expand the vision for “Never Enough.” For one video, Lyons acted as stunt driver, and Fang as liaison with the operator of the cherry picker they dragged to a Baltimore park for an aerial shot.
Though Mills didn’t play on “Never Enough,” she is in the videos as a full-fledged member of the group. After patiently listening to the conversation in Fang’s living room (her face was on display on a phone propped up on a TV), she chimed in to add a succinct Turnstile thesis as a fan turned member. “The band is a vehicle for other people to just experience being themselves,” she said. That self-discovery goes not just for their audience, but for the five of them.
“I’ll always have my outlet with these guys,” McCrory said. “This never has to stop.”
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