FEATURE: Spotlight: Turnstile — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Quinn Batley

Turnstile

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THIS is a busy time…

PHOTO CREDIT: Gold Theory Artists

for the mighty Turnstile. The band released their fourth studio album, NEVER ENOUGH, in June. Even though the band formed in 2010, I think they are releasing their best music now. This series is not only about new or rising artists. I also like to shine a light on acts that might not be known to everyone. This new album is a bit of a change of direction for the U.S. Hardcore band. Not softer necessarily, though NEVER ENOUGH does bring in other genres and sounds. I would advise people to get the album. The band have a string of dates ahead, and they will be coming to the U.K. in November. I am going to end with a review for the superb NEVER ENOUGH. Before then, I want to include a few interviews with the Baltimore band. With the district and powerful lead vocals of Brendan Yates, this is a band that everybody needs to listen to. Four years on from the acclaimed GLOW ON, NEVER ENOUGH is not a radical departure in terms of its sound, though the album does have a different meaning. Turnstile approached it differently. I want to illustrate that by sourcing some interviews from this year. I will start with Pitchfork and their cover story. Brendan Yates picks up most of the promotional interviews. The band’s lead letting us in to the world of Turnstile and their awesome new album:

“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.”

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”.

There are two more interviews I will highlight before getting to a review for NEVER ENOUGH. In June, The Independent spoke with Brendan Yates about Turnstile redefining Hardcore. GLOW UP made Turnstile a more visible band. Taking them from the underground. On NEVER ENOUGH, there is this new wave of praise and affection. One that will continue as they look ahead. A band that you need to follow:

“Their imminent fourth album, Never Enough, is one of the year’s most anticipated releases – but Yates remains immersed in the creative process, largely able to ignore the surrounding buzz. On our video call, he smiles in a blue sweatshirt and wire-rimmed glasses, en route to the edit suite where he’s working on the album’s accompanying film, Turnstile: Never Enough, co-directed with the band’s guitarist Pat McCrory. They’re cutting it fine, the deadline only a few days away.

Yates is serious and considered with everything he says, letting responses meander and peter out if he doesn’t have a good enough answer. Nothing, apparently, is released if it’s not well-conceived, including his own thoughts. “The film is very intentional and abstract in a sense. It’s not a narrative with dialogue; the music is the main character and the visuals are the result of that.” He trails off. “When the album comes out there’s the context. If anyone has the patience or desire to see it in context…”

Making a visual album, he explains, is something he’s always wanted to do, since making music is a visual experience for him. It made sense that this would be the album to attempt it with: though it has 14 songs, it’s made to listen to as one continuous song. Excitingly for Yates, the film is premiering at Tribeca Festival the day before album release, having been accepted off the back of a few clips, rather than the completed film.

Yates has no training in film, but then he’s not a trained singer either – he started out as a drummer. That’s reflective of the DIY spirit in which Turnstile was formed and still operates: passion and instinct first, experimentation later. Turnstile – whose members now include founding members drummer Daniel Fang and bass and percussionist Franz Lyons, guitarist McCrory and a new addition to the ranks, Meg Mills (Chubby and the Gang, Big Cheese) – began as a conversation within a friend group of: “Alright, let’s do a band where Brendan’s singing”. Lyons, Yates’s best friend, figured out how to play bass from scratch to join them. Yates even taught himself guitar wrong, which means he has to take creative mistakes or measures when writing and playing music. All of them came from a hardcore punk background but that’s an asset rather than a limitation: “With this band, you just learn what you like and what you’re drawn to, and you follow that, and always change.”

To record NEVER ENOUGH, the band decamped to The Mansion in Los Angeles, a Laurel Canyon studio compound that birthed some of rock’s biggest hitters, including Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Slipknot’s Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) as well as Jay-Z’s hip-hop hit “99 Problems”. When asked what they did in the city around working, Yates almost laughs. “No, we wouldn’t leave the property. We would just stay in the house,” he says, kindly, explaining they had free time in the morning to journal or work out and then they’d record all day until bedtime. Two friends who did break through the band’s seclusive forcefield casually ended up on sparkly mid-tempo single “Seein’ Stars”: Blood Orange musician Dev Hynes, who Turnstile has worked with before, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams. Of Williams, Yates says, “We were just throwing paint at the wall with her decorating our song with her angelic voice; it was really special.”

He prefers not to go into detail on the themes of Never Enough but says lyrics are, as ever, highly specific to him personally. “Vastness and this idea of being a small piece in a larger universe and the fear or peace that can come from that is a theme that makes its way around the album a bit,” he says, as well as learning how to accept love. There’s a third overarching idea: “How maybe intuition is always there, but there are these constant efforts to just fight against your own intuition. I’m trying to bring attention to that.”

No intuitive nudge goes ignored across the 14 tracks of Never Enough, an irrepressible album that picks up exactly where they left off four years ago – only now, they’re pushing further in every direction. It’s heavier, more melodic, more solid yet fluid, and even more carefree in its experimentation. On the frenetic, itchy track “Dull” – built for night-time drives under the influence of revenge or lust – Yates sings, “Deep in the night / I’m waiting for the call.”

It slides seamlessly into the aggressive, power-metal-meets-thrashing-punk of “Sunshower”, which halfway through melts into Eastern flutes and blissful synths for reasons that don’t matter, because it totally works. Then, a drum roll and acidic noise coyly summon the burst of aggression that is “Look Out for Me,” all breakdown riffs and Yates screaming, “Now my heart is hanging by a thread”.

Yates admits that it’s not easy to build such a solid collaborative base from which to freewheel for 15 years. “A dynamic within a band is much different than anything else I’ve experienced in life, in a way that’s just very intense and the most beautiful and complicated and in every way,” he says thoughtfully before signing off at the studio, minutes ticking down toward his deadline. “The fact that the band can exist for this long and everyone still deeply loves each other – it feels like a miracle sometimes”.

Prior to rounding off with an NME review of NEVER ENOUGH, they spoke with Turnstile about their new album. If GLOW ON took them stratospheric, for this album, the band shut all the noise off. Not that there was pressure to top that they did in 2021. However, it is clear there was a lot of expectation around Turnstile prior to releasing their fourth studio album:

“The big-tent adventurousness of Turnstile’s music – their willingness to say, finish a furious hardcore track with a minute-long synth sequence – comes naturally to the band, McCrory says. “Elements like that come from a place that is familiar to everybody and are part of what we love about making music. We don’t just love simply writing really heavy guitar riffs.” He reveals his and Fang’s shared enthusiasm for Eurobeat from the ’90s and 2000s, recalling a time when, cooped up in a hotel room, they spent six hours making a beat (and dancing on the beds). “Being able to infuse [into the music] things like super long synths and dreamy parts… that’s very natural.”

At the same time, going through the “adaptive” “give and take” of the recording process with no external producer by their side meant Turnstile were fully responsible for all their creative decisions on ‘Never Enough’. “This whole album is definitely the most of an odyssey that we’ve ever had,” proclaims Fang, “in terms of us finding our own self-confidence in what things should feel like – and adjusting, doubting ourselves… We had to make all those decisions at the end of the day.”

“That’s the most fun part, when you have to dig [for a song] – that’s when everyone’s strength comes to the surface”

Not that Turnstile would have been in need of much outside input when they had three whirlwind years to reflect on and process. “The process of secluding ourselves in a studio and creating something is 100 per cent just diving within ourselves and unpacking thoughts and feelings that are pretty infinite in there, especially when we’re on the road,” Fang says. It’s a cycle that will probably restart again now, he points out: it’ll probably be months down the road that they process the release of ‘Never Enough’ and the premiere of its accompanying visual album, co-directed by Yates and McCrory, at Tribeca Film Festival this week. “That’s the life of touring and doing creative things non-stop, and then publishing them months after their creation. It’s just this weird timeline and weird way to interact with the world and go through life.”

There’ll be more to process yet as Turnstile hit the road this year, playing hardcore and underground festivals – they closed out Tied Down Detroit on Sunday and will headline Outbreak Festival in London next week – but also igniting the mosh at bigger multi-genre fests like Primavera Sound and Glastonbury, and striking out even farther afield. “It’s great to get presented with opportunities to play all types of different shows,” Fang says. “It’s really nice to play a festival in say, Trondheim, Norway, to a bunch of people that have never heard us before, and be able to use the band to have brand-new experiences for all of us.”

As their star continues to rise, Turnstile continue to be fuelled by their hunger for something different. What they’ve done before will never be enough. “Ideally, we never play the same venue twice,” Fang says. “The priority is to keep exploring and having an adventure”.

The final thing I want to source is a review of NEVER ENOUGH from NME. A group championed here by stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music, I am slightly new to them. However, I think their latest album is their best. It seems like they have this solid and dedicated fanbase. You can why people love them so much. That is why I wanted to include them in this Spotlight feature:

“Formed in Baltimore’s hardcore scene in 2010, Turnstile’s interest in colouring outside the genre’s lines paid off when 2021’s ‘Glow On’ – featuring a go-go breakdown and a R&B track with Blood Orange – made them Grammy-nominated international rock stars. Their bright, eccentric new album ‘Never Enough’ doubles down on those experiments while furthering their unique, pop-facing take on hardcore.

Hardcore remains its lynchpin: the album rarely strays too far from a chunky, overdriven guitar, or one of vocalist Brendan Yates’ throat-splitting yells. Some moments are faithful nods back to their early work, like ‘Sole’ and ‘Birds’, conjuring images of a sweaty small-venue show like the one pictured on the cover of 2011’s ‘Pressure To Succeed’.

For the most part, though, ‘Never Enough’ is distinguished by aesthetic left-turns and genre-hopping. ‘I Care’ is a kitschy dream-pop song, featuring hand-claps and flanged guitars, while ‘Seein’ Stars’ is a funk-rock track in the vein of The Police. There are some innovative structural shifts, as in the nearly-7-minute-long ‘Look Out For Me’: progressing through punchy hardcore, a woozy ambient section sampling TV drama The Wire, then an electronic outro nodding to Baltimore club, each section presents a tribute to their city.

This spirit of experimentation is aided by a varied cast of collaborators: the horn flourishes on ‘Dreaming’ are performed by members of BADBADNOTGOOD, while the backing vocals on ‘Seein’ Stars’ are contributed by Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes and Paramore’s Hayley Williams. Elsewhere, these guests help songs shape-shift completely. Shabaka Hutchings’ flute solo in ‘Sunshower’ turns this hardcore track into something resembling Andre 3000’s ‘New Blue Sun’. A.G. Cook warps alt-rock song ‘Dull’ into a morass of glitching vocals and squirrelly electronics.

Despite this, ‘Never Enough’ is remarkably coherent. That’s helped by the bridging power of Yates’ vocal, gritty enough to fit the hardcore end but tonally appealing enough to sell the poppier moments. While the lyrics suggest complex feelings amid Turnstile’s post-‘Glow On’ success – “this is where I wanna be, but I can’t feel a fucking thing,” he howls on ‘Sunshower’ – the constant assuredness of Yates’ delivery helps anchor everything else.

But what really glues ‘Never Enough’ together is its poptimist mindset. Combining a sentimental regard for various shades of rock with a focus on big, bright melodies (think of those sparkly synths backing the second pre-chorus vocal in the title track), and a free-wheeling approach to musical referents, the album constantly reaches out to the pop world: exploring how hardcore might form the basis for something technicolour, playful and accessible. That attitude towards the genre, as capable of mass appeal and ripe for experimentation, is what powers this excellent album”.

Go and follow the epic Turnstile. A Baltimore band who I hope do spend more time in the U.K. – aside from the dates they have later in the year -, I would love to catch them one day. NEVER ENOUGH is one of the best albums of the year. You feel they will grow even better and better. For that reason alone, you do not want to miss out…