In April, Turnstile’s name unexpectedly appeared in vast letters on the backdrop of Charli xcx’s set at the Coachella festival. In the coming months, she suggested, “Turnstile summer” would replace her ubiquitous “Brat summer”. Hedging her bets slightly, she also suggested that 2025 would be the summer of everyone from Addison Rae and PinkPantheress to Kali Uchis to Pulp. Nevertheless, Turnstile’s name stood out: the quintet are, at root, a hardcore punk band, a product of the fertile Baltimore scene that spawned Trapped Under Ice, Ruiner and Stout. For the most part, hardcore exists in its own world of rigid rules and codes, some distance from the mainstream: extant hardcore punk bands seldom get shouted out by huge pop stars.
Then again, hardcore punk bands don’t tend to receive Grammy nominations or make the US Top 30, as Turnstile have done. Meanwhile, Charli xcx’s endorsement is just another celebrity nod in the band’s direction after backing from Metallica’s James Hetfield, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, R&B star Miguel and Demi Lovato, who described them as her favourite band. Their tipping point came with the release of 2021’s Glow On, on which frontman Brendan Yates moved his shouty vocal style towards singing, and the band expanded their musical remit in unexpected directions. They may be the only act in history to sound like a warp-speed hardcore band in the time-honoured tradition of Minor Threat or the Circle Jerks, and – entirely without irony or satirical intent – like the kind of glossy new-wave 80s pop to which hardcore was once ideologically opposed, on adjacent tracks of the same album.
