I assumed my first few moments around Turnstile would go something like this: congratulate them on their success, small-talk-small-talk-small-talk, inquire about new material they’re working on, and wait for the perfect window to ask how it feels to be the biggest thing in hardcore music. But, instead, the band instinctively senses that I, too, am from Baltimore, and our conversation launches into hyperlocal IRL Yelp reviews of the city’s beloved—and maligned—spots for late-night eats. There’s Sip & Bite, in Canton, which is best saved for when you’re drunk and desperate. There’s the ’50s-sci-fi-themed Lost City diner, in Station North, which opens for only a few months at a time every seven years or so for no detectable reason.
And then there’s the Papermoon diner, in Remington, that’s littered with wacky toys: old Pez dispensers trapped inside the glass of the front counter, an army of ’90s action figures staring out the window, baby dolls hanging from the ceiling in a very unsettling manner. “I sent some friends from out of town there, and they went just to get a milkshake and they wouldn’t seat them,” Brendan Yates, the band’s frontman, remembers of its quirks. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you can’t just order a milkshake. If you want to be seated, you have to get a whole meal.’ ”
For Yates, it’s a relief to talk about Baltimore in a way that isn’t let me explain to you how much of a hidden gem this place is. It’s early spring and the city is finally starting to poke its head up from the misery of winter. The Orioles are back on the field, newly aspiring joggers crowd the park walkways that are otherwise barren, and old heads are breaking out their three-wheeled Slingshots again, playing Jeezy so loud that windowpanes tremble.
Despite our exchange about the city’s quirkiest holes-in-the-wall, we’ve settled in the back room of the more sensible Artifact Coffee. Pat McCrory, one of Turnstile’s guitarists, orders the Ham Jam, a seriously buttered sandwich stacked with collard greens, eggs, cheese, sliced ham, and spicy jelly. As we trade memories of Baltimore’s greasy spoons, there’s a sense of calm from everyone here; in conversation, the band members engage earnestly but, at various points throughout our time at Artifact, I catch each of them silently basking in the serenity of a sunny morning. It’s meditative.
This is the speed at which these guys live when they’re not leading congregations of folks who delight in opening up pits at concert halls and stadiums across the globe, which is most of the time. For the past few weeks, the hardcore heroes have been luxuriating in this rare lull, savoring their last few moments of tranquility before hitting the road ahead of the release of their fourth studio album, Never Enough, which, fittingly, emphasizes the importance of taking your time and sitting in stillness.
You could call it a reaction to the past four years for Turnstile, the most commercially successful and busiest stint of their 15-year existence. In 2021, they released their third album, Glow On, which took them from a standout in the hardcore realm to a superstar band in a world that doesn’t produce superstar bands anymore. They broke containment and went wide. In December of 2021, a few months after the album’s release, they made their late-night television debut on Seth Meyers. They eventually opened up for their childhood heroes, Blink-182, on a world tour. The fact that “Blackout,” “Holiday,” and “Alien Love Call” were all nominated for Grammys is the final piece of evidence that fans and skeptics would point to and say: See what I mean?
But the beauty of Glow On was that it felt like a natural progression for Turnstile, a band that always distinguished itself by embracing and incorporating elements of non-rock music and going full genre bender—dream pop, funk, and the DC-based go-go sound all showed up at one point or another. Critical acclaim and A-list cosigns followed. Demi Lovato identified them as their favorite band; Metallica frontman James Hetfield rocked out to them side stage at a festival. More recently, at this year’s Coachella, Charli XCX suggested it’d be a “Turnstile Summer.” Never Enough should validate their new position in the pop culture sphere—or maybe even combat the idea that they have to be validated at all.
Turnstile’s bold, creative direction only adds to the band’s appeal. The video for the lead single, “Never Enough,” will be part of a larger project when they’re done rolling things out, one that turns the album into a long music film—think of it as a more extended take on 2021’s 11-minute short, Turnstile Love Connection. In the first chapter, blue morning light rests over waves crashing against a shoreline, and off into the distance, Yates rides a jet ski, almost comically unbothered by the chop of the sea. McCrory jams on his guitar in a valley of sprawling green mountains. Bassist Franz Lyons rocks out in the crowded intersection of a bustling metropolis. Daniel Fang drums relentlessly in the middle of a desert. Meg Mills, the band’s new guitarist, strums away in a wintry terrain, surrounded by snow.
“To even bring that idea to life wouldn’t really have been possible years ago,” Yates says of the globe-spanning video, on a Zoom call the week prior to meeting in person. “And just the fact that we have the friends, the resources, and the ability to designate all this time to build something like that—you don’t sell a music video, you know? You make it for yourself. You build something that feels really connected to the music and you’re trying to establish a feeling.” It seems that feeling, when put into the context of the earth, is: We are a small, insignificant component of the equation. And if you quiet yourself long enough to revel in that fact, maybe there’s a semblance of peace on the other side.
The single shares a large chunk of DNA with “Mystery,” Glow On’s opener. Both songs have a dreamy buildup and flashes of intensity thanks to Fang’s drumming, but there’s much more of an ambient slant to “Never Enough.” The band is asking for a heightened level of sensitivity. More space. More time to reflect. “There’s this kind of outro on [‘Never Enough’] that’s probably obnoxiously long to a listener that maybe just wants to get in and out,” Yates says. “But for us, it was very intentional. It felt really important to sit in that moment. And the amount of space you take up is equally as important as the space that you sit back on.”
To incorporate all this space, the band decamped to record much of the album at The Mansion—a Laurel Canyon music studio compound that birthed some of the biggest rock moments in history: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening, to name just a few. Turnstile set up in the house’s living room after everyone got out of bed and started chipping away at new material. “We’re not the kind of band that lives in studios,” says Yates. “It’s usually: write everything at home and keep everything very personal. And then, when the band feels like it’s at a point where this is an album, we’re like, ‘Okay, let’s go into a studio.’ There’s something cool about living in a house and recording and living in music for a bit.”
For the album, Yates took over main production duties for the first time in the band’s career, but the group also reenlisted rock producer Will Yip—who fully helmed 2018’s Time & Space—to chip in some additional production work. Beyond conceptual intent, it’s arguable that the ambient notes that rule so much of the new album are also indicative of how much access the band now has to state-of-the-art studios. The sound of hardcore is born out of intention and immediacy, but also time and money. “We used to be a band that was like, ‘Yo, all right, we can record an album, but the dude said it’s gonna be like $500 and we gotta get it done in four days,’ ” says Yates. “We didn’t get to spend too much time on it.” Now, having gone four years without dropping an album, the group is feeling understandably excited about finally getting to share new material.
“Anytime we’re going into forward-facing mode, I feel like everybody starts getting cues from each other,” Franz Lyons says back at the café. “We’re editing songs [from the album], and you keep getting hype from adding that one little piece. Then a video comes out, and that’s another piece. We’ve been listening to the record forever now. But now it’s like bubbling.”
This sort of communal urgency is where they thrive. “Ninety percent of the time, we all share space every day. And we’re working together to do something bigger,” McCrory adds. “And then when you go home, you’re like, I’m gonna ride my bike, or, I’m climbing by myself. The isolated things are the biggest brain shift.” For McCrory it was almost like they’d been living in a collective consciousness. “If it was only me by myself doing everything all day, I’d probably be like a caveman or something.”
Turnstile have been sharing their lives since 2010 when they recorded their first 7-inch, Pressure to Succeed. Before then, the majority of members had been active in the Baltimore-DC hardcore scene for a few years, from teens into early adulthood, and, even in the early days, most were playing in other area bands. Two of those that grew alongside Turnstile were Trapped Under Ice and Angel Du$t, both cofounded by Justice Tripp, a Baltimore hardcore legend. The former started in the late 2000s and went on to offer a combination of thrashing and head-banging hardcore that bordered on punk. (Yates played as the band’s drummer in his early career, and he still performs with the group when he can.) Angel Du$t are a more experimental take on the genre, rife with melodies and skate-punk vocals. In that band, Yates and McCrory contributed guitar while Fang drummed. Early Turnstile—and their current form, one could argue—live somewhere in the middle of these sensibilities.
The first LP, 2015’s Nonstop Feeling, opens with a sample from Dem Raider Boyz, a step squad from Fang’s high school days. The vast majority of the album consisted of hot-blooded riffing and the occasional, collective “woo!” to punctuate escalations of energy. But even on “Blue by You,” Yates uses a somber tone to sing about what could be interpreted as the gradual nature of a romantic partner mentally checking out. Time & Space, their first album with the rock and metal label Roadrunner and their introduction to the mainstream, is the true sample of the textural ambitions Turnstile had for their music, even if not fully realized. Some interludes felt like mellow elevator music; one of Lauryn Hill’s backup singers, Tanikka Charraé, contributed an unexpected R&B detour (“Bomb”) a quarter of the way through. Diplo also added some production to “Right to Be.”
If Time & Space was divisive for hardcore purists, Glow On was a line in the sand. With every album Turnstile have released over the last decade, someone takes issue with how much they color outside of hardcore’s lines. But, at this point, they’ve already gotten used to dealing with detractors. It’s like aging millennials scoffing at the NBA stars of today, upset that the new style of play is centered around three-point shooting and up-tempo scoring rather than the conservatively paced, defense-wins-championships approach they grew up adoring. At the end of the day, it’s still professional basketball, ain’t it?
“I wouldn’t say I’m bothered by it, but it’s something I feel like I can’t subscribe to,” Yates tells me. “Because everyone has a different idea of what they want, how they define a certain culture or genre. But, to me, growing up going to hardcore shows, it’s hard to just subscribe to that dialogue, only because I think it’s something that is not defined by the sonics of it. It’s more grounded in community.” The bigger Turnstile get, the more that fans will try to chip away at their armor. Maybe if, having signed to a division of Warner Music Group and amassing unlikely fame, they would have picked up and moved to New York or Los Angeles, these critiques would have more of an effect on the band.
But, as Yates alluded to, Turnstile are still very much a part of the community they sprouted from. With the exception of Mills, the whole band lives in or around the North Baltimore area where the heavy music scene has thrived for decades. Their music videos still feature people from that world, and, as massive as they’ve become, they still try to show love to the same small venues they were playing 10 years ago. “People can be from the same place geographically, but not necessarily, like, overlap culturally at all. And I think Baltimore, it naturally creates a little bit of a glue,” says Yates.
“When you’re really connected to your community and the people that support you, you can go really far out of bounds,” Paramore’s Hayley Williams says of Turnstile’s approach. “Sure, you might leave some people behind and they might always relate to you more nostalgically, but when you’re true to your own ambitions and exploration, more often than not, if it’s good, the right people will follow. As a person who’s in a band that has been similarly musically agnostic, I look at them and they’re a beacon.”
Baltimore, and the band’s decision to remain there, adds to the Turnstile allure. But as much as Turnstile love to remain rooted in Charm City, it would be disingenuous to say they’re unchanged by Glow On’s success. The difficulties of making an album with limited studio time are no longer an obstacle that needs to be cleared, and, obviously, there’s an ease that comes with not having to worry about your collective survival outside of music. “I think it definitely changed all of our lives, but, simultaneously, it didn’t,” Yates says. “We’ve been touring in bands for so long and this band has existed for so long, we’ve just been doing the same thing, and constantly growing, and growing [in the] understanding of what we wanna do. But what did change are just the opportunities and visibility and the ability to play the main stage. Like, we played a festival before on the tent stage in the back parking lot, but now we’re actually playing to thousands of people.”
After we finish up our breakfast sandwiches at Artifact, I hitch a ride to Lyons’s crib with Fang, who unnecessarily apologizes for his car’s messiness. From the outside, Lyons’s house is a textbook Baltimore row home with a modest porch made for relaxing on a nice day or having a smoke while you people-watch. But once you step in, it’s a master class in DIY home improvement. The living room has new, deep-brown wooden floors and when you look up, the same wood has been used for a slick, cabinlike drop ceiling. “All this wood is from a church in West Baltimore. All the planks still have the address,” Lyons points out. We all settle into the kitchen at a round white table with ample seating. I start to talk to them about the makings of Never Enough, but not before Yates FaceTimes Meg Mills, who’s at home in London before she flies over to the East Coast next week.
Mills vividly remembers joining the band while it was supporting Blink-182 at a show in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I was definitely thrown in at the deep end,” she says, propped up on Lyons’s kitchen counter through Yates’s phone. “There was a bit of a technical difficulty as well that makes it even more memorable. We hadn’t had a chance to rehearse with the whole lighting setup for the stage. Obviously, enormous venue, the biggest amount of people I’ve ever played to. The lights came on, and they were like maximum brightness; could not see a thing for the entire set. I came offstage like, Wow, that was really intense. I’m gonna have to get used to doing that every night. And everyone was like, ‘Why the heck were the lights so bright?’ ”
Never Enough is Turnstile’s first album without founding member and guitarist Brady Ebert. In an Instagram story from the Turnstile page in 2022, the band announced Ebert’s departure and wished him well. Yates declined to comment further, but instead sang Mills’s praises. “Building chemistry in a band, you need to prioritize communication and friendship over everything. I think the rest works itself out,” he says. “It’s a full-time job in itself. It’s infinitely imperfect, like any relationship. So you can either choose to ignore that or choose to always be watering it and accept that. Meg coming in has been such a great addition.”
The new album isn’t the kind of sonic leap that Glow On was following Time & Space. But there’s more space on every song, fuller orchestrations and lusher arrangements, synth leads, horn lines. Members of BadBadNotGood, the electronic-jazz band with whom Turnstile collaborated on an EP in 2023, contribute horn parts. There are a few digital filigrees and subtones added by the experimental pop wizard A. G. Cook. A whole posse of guests expands the sonic world of the band. “I Care” feels like an anthem for sunny days in California; “Seein’ Stars” sounds uncannily like a Police song. Yates’s delivery is even more melodic this time around, reverb and backing vocals allowing him to ping around your headphones. “Birds” is an energetic onslaught; Fang’s drums send you into shock while Yates, as he tends to do at least a few times every album, leans into his Zack de la Rocha bag, half rapping.
But, for me, the most rewarding stretch of the album is squarely in the middle. “Sunshower” starts off with maniacal guitar riffs, and Yates’s energy matches perfectly as he shares, “Just when I thought that I could never get it right / Now I’m taking flight / And my head is overjoyed / And this is where I wanna be.” The first half beats you over the head, but the second half washes over you with a serene flute riff played by the former Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming bandleader Shabaka. That dissolves into the pounding “Look Out for Me,” which hits even harder after you’ve been mellowed out. On the hook, Yates yelps, “Now my heart is hanging by a thread!” Then, the outro of the song removes all percussion and cues heart-monitor-sounding synths that build up to a dreamy, Baltimore club–inspired drum pattern. Like the go-go nod that closed “Blackout” on Glow On, this pays respects to Turnstile’s home turf. It’s also the band’s longest song ever, nearing seven minutes.
It all comes back to extending moments to their absolute zenith, so that some sort of clarity is at the end of the tunnel. In reality, Never Enough doesn’t depart very far from where Glow On left off—at least in its general sound palette. But you do get the sense that they, at some point, in the process of becoming the biggest thing in hardcore over the past four years, had gotten to a place where shit was becoming too loud, too demanding, too routine, and a feasible way to disrupt that energy was to begin manipulating time.
“Maybe there’s a psychological reason why there might be some of this kind of desire for certain stillness around these chaotic bits,” Yates ponders. “Something about it feels important to breathe for a second amongst that.” It’s not that the chaotic moments are absent in Never Enough, but there’s a sense that they’re all collectively learning that one must also revel in those moments of calm to keep a sound mind.
It’s a refreshingly honest approach. After 15 years of grinding it out and becoming the heir apparent to the biggest, actually good band in mainstream rock, the world has watched Turnstile for the past couple years and wondered, How the hell are you gonna follow up something as groundbreaking as Glow On? This is what they did. They didn’t try to reinvent heavy music. They didn’t go for showstopping features. They leaned in to what’s been burning at their core and utilized hardcore as a tool to confront those feelings head-on.
“This record made room just to experience that kind of dynamic and that kind of energy, but also to embrace moments of stillness,” Yates says. “In my head I’m like, No one’s got patience in this day and age to listen to a seven-minute song, but I guess it doesn’t matter if they do or not. I think we need to go there and we need to live there and embrace being there. It kind of just challenged the idea of, why do I need to keep moving? In some ways, there’s an idea of existing as a small speck in a big universe, which can bring peace to perspective.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Quinn Batley
Videos by Kei Tsuruta
Grooming by Patti Nelson at The Artist Agency
Special thanks to Carpet Company and Hotel Ulysses, an Ash Hotel