‘Pepper spraying a 15-year-old is cowardly’: The revolving door on hostile cops, playing through pain, and taking hardcore punk global | music

HeyOn a Wednesday evening in September, about 6,000 people crossed footbridges to reach Brown’s Island, a country park located in the middle of the James River in Richmond, Virginia. They’re here to see Turnstile, the Baltimore band that came from the hardcore punk underground but whose reach extends beyond this world.

Turnstile takes the stage to a slew of shimmering keyboards – provided by Never Enough, the lead single from their new album. It’s a slow song by Turnstile’s standards, a tender confession of self-doubt that turns into a watered down ballad. The moment the song ends, Turnstile jumps straight into TLC (Turnstile Love Connection), a frenzied fist of 2021 Glow On, and the audience becomes a mass of flailing limbs. For the next hour, bodies fly in all directions, while strangers shout words at each other. Every new note, every change in tempo, brings a new wave of sweaty ecstasy.

Revolving door parties have been this way for years. In the early days, the band played in pubs and church halls, and the shows were not entirely performed on stage. Frontman Brendan Yates would dive into the ballet in the audience, and the stage would be a continuous blur of people in the audience running, grabbing the microphone to cut a line or two and then jumping back.

In 2009, a teenage Yates dropped out of college to become the drummer for the legendary Baltimore powerhouse band Trapped Under Ice. He formed Turnstile with his close friends a year later, and the band enjoyed huge underground buzz from the start. By the time they released their full-length debut Nonstop Feeling in 2015, they were one of the biggest bands in hardcore. While many of their peers have gone to extremes, Turnstile’s swirling hooks and colorful aesthetic set them apart. They soon began to attract fans outside their subculture.

When I saw my first Turnstile show in a Washington, D.C., church hall in 2018, drummer Daniel Fang played in a hospital gown. He missed the Turnstile show because he was injured while training for the tour. Vang tells the story as the band checks in on a Zoom call from a hotel room in Mesa, Arizona, a few weeks after a Richmond show. “The doctor said to me, ‘You’ll go into kidney failure if you go on the show. Don’t do it,'” Fang recalls. But he refused to miss the show, so he left the hospital and drove the car himself. “I was delirious with pain, but then I felt a kind of amplified beauty as well. It was so much fun.”

It was the joy that really struck me – not just the dedication with which Fang checked himself out of the hospital, but the euphoria that Fang and his bandmates clearly felt that night. It was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. An image has stuck with me ever since: Yates leaping off the stage during the first song and seemingly hanging in the air for hours before completing his full flip and landing in the middle of the crowd. Such concerts turned fans into evangelists, and the band’s momentum continued to grow.

Turnstile’s third album, 2021’s Glow On, was their breakout moment. For this album, the band worked with veteran pop producer Mike Elizondo and moved toward a brighter sound, with sparkling hooks and rhythmic breakdowns, that was still rooted in hardcore catharsis. The record hit just as coronavirus lockdowns were ending, and his charged energy was infectious. Turnstile’s audience has grown dramatically. They’ve earned Grammy nominations, toured arenas with Blink-182 and served as the only rock band at rap festivals like Rolling Loud in Miami.

Earlier this year, just before the release of Never Enough, several thousand people came to Turnstile’s free daytime show at Wyman Park Dell in their hometown. Every moment was marked by friends and well-wishers rushing onto the stage, only to do a cartwheel or backflip straight away. However, these days, not every Turnstile set can be like that. The crowds that come to see them are simply too large. They need to play in stadiums with barriers between them and the fans, so they can find ways to channel all that frenetic energy themselves. They always figure it out.

Much of the show’s powerful magic lies in the lack of distinction between performers and audience—the way the audience itself becomes the show. When Turnstile plays to thousands every night, they can’t recreate the feeling in the same way, but they find other ways to channel and channel that collective energy. “The biggest transition was learning how to perform on stage instead of being part of the show,” says bassist Franz Lyons. “You start learning that you need to create energy with all of you, just to come together and project that on the other side.”

On stage, the five members of Turnstile are always in motion: jumping, twirling, stomping, demanding that the audience give them more. They’re dripping with buckets of sweat, looks of amazement and triumph in their eyes. Just watching is exhausting, but when you’re near the front of a Turnstile show, you can’t really watch. You’re too busy being busy and bumping into people yourself.

You don’t see a lot of high-end phones at Turnstile’s offerings. People should be alert. In the old days, it was always possible for someone to jump off the stage and land on your head. Even with barriers preventing stage jumping, a Turnstile concert is still a full-body immersion experience. But it is a welcome, not a ban. The giant screen at the back of the stage doesn’t often show what’s happening on stage. Instead, it shows the overwhelmed, joyful faces of people in the crowd: people of different backgrounds, races, ages, and genders, all immersed in the moment.

This ideal vision cannot always be maintained. Turnstile ends Richmond’s show with the Birds, angry at the community from Never Enough: “Finally, I can see it! These birds weren’t meant to fly on their own!” During the collapse, Yates demands: “Get up here!” Finally people push over the barrier and join the band on stage. But amid the rush of bodies, a sheriff’s deputy sprayed one fan, a teenage boy, in the face with pepper spray in what appeared to be a completely unprovoked show of force. The fumes from the spray visibly affect Lyons, who stops playing his bass and covers his face. Video of that moment is going viral. In the following days, the mayor of Richmond claimed that the incident was under internal investigation while refusing to answer reporters’ questions on the matter.

Yates still seems upset when he thinks about the way the Richmond show ended. “The cowardly act of an officer coming in and spraying a 15-year-old and then walking away — I don’t think this is an isolated event,” he says. “But at our shows, it was new. It’s something we strive to keep out.”

When you’re playing aggressive music in front of large, enthusiastic crowds every night, a certain amount of chaos is unavoidable. “You can’t control things like this when they happen,” Yates says. “But I think we do our best to always have our eyes open for things. Sometimes, that’s just the nature of big events and people coming together.”

At this point, every Turnstile show is a big event. Their North American tour is a labor of love. They looked for places without seats, sometimes developing entirely new places when those didn’t exist in those cities. “The Denver show was just Theater Under the Bridge, and it was their first time playing a show there,” Yates says. “In Los Angeles, we just built a theater in a big park.” The band has carefully curated a tour lineup that covers a wide range. Charismatic pop maestro Jane Remover and Australian powerhouse band Speed ​​are on board for the entire tour, with groups like Melbourne’s Amyl and the Sniffers and Philadelphia’s Mannequin Pussy jumping on board at various points. In November, the band will take a version of the tour to the UK and Europe, with London rockers High Vis and California experimental band The Garden opening.

Yates says Turnstile is always looking for bandmates who share a “connecting thread” with the band: “Sometimes, that’s sonic threads. Sometimes, it’s a spiritual thread, or something sonically exciting that comes together and creates something that sounds like it could be really interesting. It gives everyone a chance to come in and bring out different people and try new things — but not “In a random way, in a very intentional way.”

This intent extends to Turnstile’s music. It’s still rooted in that explosive catharsis of hardcore, but a lot of other sounds shine through it: dance music, synthpop, funk. “Never Enough” features flute from acclaimed London jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings, vocals from Paramore’s Hayley Williams and singer-songwriter Faye Webster, and production from Charli xcx collaborator AG Cook. One of the highlights is “Look for Me,” an expansive seven-minute epic that veers from ready-made riffage into the local subgenre known as Baltimore club music. Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes has contributed to the last two Turnstile albums. At the Richmond show, Hynes plays an opening set and gets a roar from the audience when he joins Turnstile on Alien Love Call, his 2021 duet with Yates.

Even as Turnstile ventures away from the underground that birthed them, their live shows remain expressions of community. It’s not easy to maintain that feeling when you’re playing in front of thousands every night, but Turnstile remains rooted in the city and scene in which it started. Other than new guitarist Meg Mills, a veteran of UK punk bands like Big Cheese and Chubby and the Gang, they all still live in Baltimore. Yates still plays drums for his old band Trapped Under Ice whenever he gets the chance, and Lyons often joins them on stage.

Lyons’ bandmates marvel that Lyons is “in the mix all the time,” and that he still has the energy to play a local punk show right after returning from tour. “These are the things I really love doing, just like everyone else [in the band] “He loves to do it,” Lyons says. “The passion for it doesn’t stop with being in our band.”

This passion extends abroad. It’s contagious. “I’m constantly seeing them doing new things that I’ve never seen before,” says Justice Tripp, frontman of Trapped Under Ice and Angel Du$t, an older brother figure to the members of Turnstile, who calls from his tour truck. “I’ve seen every young band from Baltimore come up with ideas about what they can do to make an impact like this. It makes waves. It makes people step outside of what they know and redesign what it means to be an artist and contribute to our culture or your city.”

Yates insists Turnstile has no game plan: “We’re trying to maintain a level of appreciation for the present. Focusing too much ahead doesn’t do you much good.” It makes sense. No one could have planned for Turnstile’s rise from church halls to festival stages. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen through sweat, dedication and absolute belief in what they do.

When the members of Turnstile talk about playing live, they sometimes speak in almost vague terms. “It’s been years in the making — learning how to really work on that chemistry and teamwork, making the energy on stage so great that it can touch the people on the other side,” Lyons says.

A revolving door tour of the UK and Ireland from November 1-5; The tour begins Dublin. It’s never enough out now.