The night after they played to what looked like the entire population of Brooklyn at NYC venue Under the K Bridge, I had a dream that Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates bought a forest.
Each member of the band — guitarists Pat McCrory and Meg Mills, bassist Franz Lyonsand drummer Daniel Fang — lived in a sprawling treehouse like we were on Endor, with Yates excitedly telling me they were figuring out how to start building more houses for their friends to move in, and eventually fans.
“You did it, man,” I remember telling Yates, “This is all yours,” as we looked down on the forest floor, before I woke up. The dream felt apt enough — an alchemization of the magnitude of that Brooklyn blowout and my obsessive watching of every online video of Turn-stile’s other outside show, held a month earlier in the lush Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore.
That city, their hometown, has been fetishized as a sort of exotic, Endor-like offworld in much of the music writing about the band’s latest album, NEVER ENOUGH. I get it. For most music press interested in only covering guitar bands when they’ve crossed over the threshold of “cool,” how else could a hardcore band reach that point and not be alien entities?
In some ways there is a sort of mythical quality to Turnstile, which I’ll get to in a second, but the core reason for the band’s exponential growth with each record is mostly unsexy: They work really fucking hard.
If you’re not familiar with their origin story by now, Turnstile branched off from Baltimore hardcore kingpins Trapped Under Ice in 2010 via Yates, then that band’s drummer. Each successive record felt like a little bit of a Big Bang event relative to Turnstile’s size at the time — their funky debut LP, Nonstop Feeling, earned them an electric set at then-crown-jewel fest This Is Hardcore; 2018’s Time & Space, their first album on a major, propelled them into bigger rooms; and 2021’s GLOW ON brought their brand of hardcore to the Coachellas and Camp Flog Gnaws of the world, not to mention what seems like every late-night TV program.
If there is a mythical quality to the band, it’s their amoebic ability to make the biggest venue feel like a unified small room, and the smallest room feel like the site of a larger-than-life event. Seeing them in 2016 in the now-closed Brooklyn DIY venue Sunnyvale was a mosh-to-survive event, shoulder to shoulder with maybe 200 kids, but everyone was in it together.
When Turnstile leveled up to play in front of over a thousand people a couple years later at Warsaw, fans pitched in to help a person in a wheelchair crowdsurf to the stage. Most recently, in front of 10,000 in Brooklyn, that sense of community miraculously still felt intact, attendees eagerly chattering about previous shows they caught, how wild this all is to witness. Even the night’s flashiest moment — Paramore’s Hayley Williams appearing to sing her part during “SEEIN’ STARS” — didn’t feel like a stunt, but rather a full-circle moment after her big-upping the band on Twitter nearly a decade ago.
That ability to get a diverse group of people all singing and moshing along translates to NEVER ENOUGH’s extremely wide net of sound. Yates took the helm as “art director” for the album, a title that would feel unbearably cringy if it wasn’t for the fact that it feels like an eminently fitting descriptor for what he does. He helps guide production decisions on the record, from the starbursts of reverb right before the breakdown of “SLOWDIVE,” to the straight-up detour into house music that concludes “LOOK OUT FOR ME.”
There’s precedent for all of these switch-ups — every argument I got into with friends or other music writers that, no, actually, it is cool that Step 2 Rhythm’s “Keep It Moving” does sort of sound like Red Hot Chili Peppers — which echoes today in keyboard punks getting pissed off that the band is floating further and further away from hardcore’s terra firma into a sky never traveled for the genre. But that urge to look for new skies to take hardcore has driven the band from the beginning, and as a result, their explosion of popularity feels earned.
Sure, there’s an innate protectiveness in punk music that happens when people outside of it suddenly rally behind a band, but it’s never felt like crossover appeal was something Turnstile calculated. Instead, it’s come organically, the result of a highly sought-after, rarely achieved, ineffable quality that countless record-label boardrooms have tried and failed to distill into something replicable.
Watching Yates onstage, his uninhibited dancing and lightning-shot presence can make him seem like a man having a religious experience as he bounces and twists in time with his bandmates and the crowd — everyone channeling and charging their collective energy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime essence, his and Turnstile’s, and it’s converted fans from all over.
If I were to guess what Yates was going to tell me at the end of my dream, it would probably be something along the lines of “Nah, we did it,” another platitude that would feel infinitely corny if it wasn’t him saying it — if it wasn’t coming from a band that puts their community on the same level as themselves, and done so from the beginning. A band that, no matter what heights they levitate to, will always be hardcore at heart. A band that has earned every bit of critical acclaim and commercial crossover through their endless hard work. A band whose forest of friends and fans deserves to cover Earth, Endor and beyond.
Turnstile are nominated for five 2026 GRAMMY awards, including “Best Metal Performance” and “Best Rock Album.” You can vote for them here.