With the release of their latest album, NEVER ENOUGH, Baltimore-based hardcore band Turnstile has taken the punk scene by storm, and with a tour across the United States and Europe kicking off this fall, the five-piece band shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Despite gaining worldwide recognition, Turnstile will forever appreciate their community in Baltimore. A few weeks before the release of their album, the band put on an explosive performance at Wyman Park Dell. The show was a free benefit concert that raised over $35,000 in support of local organization Health Care for the Homeless. Videos of the concert quickly gained traction on social media as viewers across the globe were in awe of the energy the band brought to their hometown. Among the thousands of videos were clips of toddlers stagediving into the crowd and being carefully lifted back onto the stage, where they dove off again and again. Although a high-energy set, the crowd of nearly 10,000 looked after one another as they two-stepped to tracks new and old.
The band has garnered support from alternative music legends. Hayley Williams has notably been a long-standing supporter of Turnstile. The day prior to the release of NEVER ENOUGH, Williams attended the premiere of the band’s accompanying visual album, and later that evening, sang with frontman Brendan Yates at the band’s album release show at Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn, New York. Williams later shared on Instagram,
really love to see friends and subculture and a band that will live forever on the silver screen. NEVER ENOUGH is fuckin’ gorgeous.
Support has flooded in from artists such as Demi Lovato, James Hetfield (Metallica), and even Charli XCX, whose Coachella performance was backed with graphics suggesting it would be “Turnstile Summer.”
Along with their rise in popularity has come backlash from hardcore fans. Many of them claim Turnstile are “sellouts,” and with their genre-bending release of NEVER ENOUGH, punk purists refuse to label the band as hardcore. However, Turnstile has proved they have deep roots in the hardcore scene, which will only continue to grow stronger in the years to come.
