Released In the latter half of 2021, Turnstile’s third record, Glow On, managed to turn them into a phenomenon on a level beyond where they had ascended before, cementing them as the de facto heir to the informal throne of hardcore punk music. In that late-summer resurgence of live music after a difficult year, the collision of new Turnstile with people’s first shows in ages saw them embark on a tour of unprecedented intensity, beginning at a bandshell in their home city of Baltimore that found people reveling in their ability to catapult themselves offstage once more into the waiting arms of other fans. But the thing about Turnstile, their beautiful and confounding essence, is that in hearing them you’re about as likely to recall hardcore as you are alt-rock, metal, or any of the other numerous sources from which Turnstile have drawn to create such an exemplary piece of punk music. The cover of Glow On: a soft pastel pink, an altered skyscape, is the first hint that this is a variety of punk music that is every bit as vital as anything that has come before, but also sees itself in a different way: willing to diversify its sound, and committed to exposing more prominently its core emotional truths.
Seeing Turnstile live is a whole other beast, not different than what you’d expect listening to the record, but supremely impactful in the way only live performances can be, the type of thing that stays with you for days afterward. The one thing that testifies to the energy in the room better than anything else is how there’s a circle pit going – to Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ – before the band even walks onstage. Security approaches the barrier in anticipation of crowd surfers, and one guy in a Turnstile shirt is more than happy to oblige, all as the band has yet to play a note. And this is after four of the wildest punk bands have already played earlier in the night; these folks have already been moshing for hours, but they’re still ravenous with anticipation of the headliner, long since desensitized to the sweat that has soaked through everyone’s outfits.
If somehow you needed another context clue to just how mesmerizing the band can be live, not only is there a sold-out crowd occupying every nanometer of Worcester’s Palladium but on the side of the stage, there’s a whole second gathering of about two dozen people, members of other bands and guests, watching every moment from the side of the fray. Frontman Brendan Yates is the nexus of a sort of invisible cyclone that seems to compel him and his bandmates – especially bassist Franz Lyons – to leap up from the floor. He’ll also occasionally fly up on a riser next to drummer Daniel Fang, using his own smaller kit to join in on percussion. From the front, a torrent of people come sailing over the barrier into the arms of a security team who should probably receive some sort of medal for their endurance. Everything is energetic with this band, but at their core is a soft – but certainly not feeble – heart.
Glow On, the overwhelming focus of the band’s set sees Yates reckoning both with the challenges of connection as well as with the stature of the band. With a vocal effect that often makes his already-powerful projection sound like it’s coming down from on high, he tackles quandaries of universal scale, often in songs with short lyrical passages that nonetheless translate the heft of the subject matter. In between the breakdowns of ‘FLY AGAIN’ he, as an Icarus-like figure, questions the value of trying to rebuild after a loss, the inherent risk of trying to form new connections when the last one took a piece from him. ‘MYSTERY’ hits a similar nerve: “I believe in holding on to life / but I’m afraid, too’. ‘BLACKOUT’ addresses the band’s profile, grappling with the often-precarious position of being the figurehead of an entire swathe of modern music. Yates examines how he exists in the context of the (quite literal) spotlight and the audience, the cathartic exercise of the performance itself, and how that performative element, summoned in the same way most nights, doesn’t make the experience of the music and the interplay between band and crowd any less impactful or authentic.
Another standout of the record, ‘TLC (Turnstile Love Connection)’, is maybe the punchiest song ever written about emotional intimacy. With Sly and the Family Stone interpolated in its coda, it cements the value of honesty in the two-way street of a relationship, whether it’s between Yates and his audience or between two people in any kind of communication. It’s not important solely to be yourself, it’s important that those around you help you see yourself as well, to have feedback, to truly be part of something beyond the boundaries of your own experience. That’s the message with which the band chooses to close the night, and similarly to how the show began, people are airborne at the hands of their friends well after the band has disappeared backstage, thriving on that residual energy buzzing around the room. Feel free to believe the hype: Turnstile are a genuine punk phenomenon for this – and any – generation of listeners, uniting better than anyone before the extreme energy of their instrumentation and live shows with the empathy and humanism that ought to inform any musician aspiring to call themselves punk.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
