How the stars aligned to make Turnstile the next big thing
On June 13th, 2025, Brendan Yates looked out on a sight that he might just be getting used to seeing. A vast crowd of people all going absolutely mental to the sounds of his band, Turnstile. Over the past five years, the number of people Yates has observed doing that has been growing and growing at a steady pace. However, there’s a difference looking out from the stage and seeing a packed out rock club or theatre, and looking out on the location Yates was performing at on that balmy, early summer night.
You see, the stage that Yates was looking out from was located in Victoria Park, and a group of over 15,000 people looked back at him. This was a stage that, the very next day, would see Charli XCX draw her epoch-defining Brat era to a close. At the time of writing, Raye will be headlining the same stage in a few months time, ditto Chase and Status. So, how does a stage built for the most exciting names in music also host an esoteric hardcore band from Baltimore? What’s more, how does said esoteric hardcore band from Baltimore completely deserve their spot there?
Especially because, even as hardcore bands go, Turnstile sticks out like a sore thumb. Extreme music has always had a place on big stages—just look at Sleep Token headlining Download Festival or Slayer playing at Finsbury Park. However, Turnstile aren’t like that. On their last two records, 2021’s breakout record Glow On and 2025’s masterpiece Never Enough, the band has sought to straddle the worlds of indie rock and hardcore equally.
This may sound like an attempt to broaden their sound and shave off their edges. Put simply, an attempt at selling out. The truth is that once you get a hardcore band to the level Turnstile were at with their 2018 record Nonstop Feeling, the smart option is to stay in your lane, keep your loyal cult following by any means necessary. By broadening their musical horizons, the band ran the risk of losing both audiences. Becoming too smooth for hardcore audiences and too rough for indie audiences. That, by the looks of things, hasn’t happened.
How did Turnstile break into the mainstream?
If anything, this is because whatever developments have come to the band’s sound have come naturally. This is not a band that has spent a moment thinking about how to make their sound “playlistable” or “TikTok-ready”. This is merely a band whose members listen to a lot more music than just hardcore or punk rock. Honestly, this is something you can see right from the off as well.
The music on their first two albums and first handful of EPs are far from your average hardcore thrashings. This was a band more than willing to throw in influences from funk, dance and indie rock from the very beginning. It’s more than just musical dilettantism too. The band have said multiple times how the go-go scene of their native Baltimore has been influencing their music for as long as they’ve been playing together.
Which I think is the core of their appeal. Punk rock lives and dies by its sincerity, we can all tell when a so-called punk-rocker doesn’t mean it maaaaaan. Turnstile do, and they do so proudly in their own way. One that simultaneously proudly reps where they came from while also taking their music to heights far further than anyone expeted them to go.
I hope those 15,000 who watched their Outbreak set got good and used to that sight, just as I hope that Brendan Yates got used to those 15,000 people. Those are going to be very common occurences for Turnstile from here on out and there are basically no bands around that deserve it as much as them.
