The Baltimore band have built a vast fanbase with their explosive live performances, but an incident at a recent show laid bare the challenges they face as they ascend to superstar status. Can they maintain their hardcore ethos?
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n a Wednesday evening in September, about 6,000 people cross footbridges to reach Brown’s Island, a bucolic park in the middle of the James River in Richmond, Virginia. They’re here to see Turnstile, the Baltimore band who came from the hardcore punk underground but whose reach expands far outside that world.
Turnstile take the stage to a shimmering swell of keyboards – the intro from Never Enough, the title track from their new album. It’s a slow song by Turnstile standards, a tender confession of self-doubt that builds into a cathartic singalong. The moment that the song ends, Turnstile jump directly into TLC (Turnstile Love Connection), a frantic fist-pumper from 2021’s Glow On, and the crowd become a mass of flailing limbs. For the next hour-plus, bodies fly in all directions, as strangers scream lyrics into each other’s faces. Every new riff, every change in tempo, brings a fresh wave of sweaty euphoria.
Turnstile gigs have been like this for years. In the early days, the band played dive bars and church halls, and the shows never took place entirely on stage. Frontman Brendan Yates would dive balletically into the crowd, and the stage would be a constant blur of people from the audience running up, grabbing the microphone to belt out a line or two and then leaping back off.
