Promises, Promises

The hope and artifice of Turnstile

Turnstile wants the summer. And going by how skillful they are in taking the algorithm, it is theirs to lose. They have it almost down to a ritual: teasing out select high-concept—and extremely high-budget—videos just after the winter thaw, followed by a benefit show in their home city as the UV index shoots up. All of it immaculately stylized to capture the eye and to lift the heart in a very seasonal kind of way. Whatever it takes to make you ubiquitous online, as these efforts currently are.

And why shouldn’t they have the summer? Turnstile is a very summer-coded kind of band. If by summer we mean not simply the promise of new beginnings but the fruition of new possibilities. Hopes, once obscure and intangible, come into focus and right up to your face, pushing into the darkness all the vulgarities and ugliness of the past. It’s something we’ve seen before in punk, 40 years ago exactly. Dischord Records in DC introduced the concept of “Revolution Summer” to set American hardcore on a more nuanced and inclusive path. I say “concept” because beyond its place in American punk lore, I have no idea what Revolution Summer actually was. It wasn’t quite a festival, nor was it really a happening or a movement. It seemed like a state of mind, a philosophy put to its most utopian praxis, at least as encapsulated by Rites of Spring’s typically Dionysian set from that time. I look at Turnstile and see and hear familiar echoes. But going by the title of the album coming out next month, to say nothing of its proportions, that is not sufficient.

It’s difficult, and maybe even ill-advised, for people of a certain age (if we’re being generous, I’d say people born before 1990) to approach let alone to understand Turnstile fairly. Doing so will never not create a fault line. On the one side you have the hopefuls, who take everything I just described at face-value. Turnstile is a perfect expression of the collective yearning of the upcoming generation. They ignite a reawakening in every sense of the word, yes, but it is fully adapted to the times. Turnstile is meeting the zeitgeist head-on in a way no rock band is doing at the moment and they deserve our support. But on the other side you have the skeptics, if not the outright cynics, who see only the most astroturfed artificiality of the whole enterprise. Turnstile are ambitious to a fault, recycling signs and signifiers for pure fan service. Hardcore kids are the new Disney adults, on whose boundless enthusiasm Turnstile pogo dance all the way to the bank and to more Converse endorsement deals along the way. (Even Revolution Summer had its detractors, like Government Issue.) There is an added air of suspicion around them because, as far as I can tell, these are the people talking the most about the band.

I’d first heard of Turnstile at the time GLOW ON was released, appropriately enough in August of 2021. It was the same process: stylized videos, revivalist live sets, and waves of hype. They were the toast of critics, but also of Gen X dads and my Xennial high school classmates whose social media posts introduced me to them (though it’s possible their earlier songs cycled in and out of my Spotify slurries with barely distinguishable hits from Title Fight, Drug Church, Angel Du$t, and so on). And I let them in gladly, because like everyone else I felt like they were needed.

After the non-stop misery of 2020 and the early part of 2021, GLOW ON was the first real invitation to joy. It was not simply about escaping the very real lows, but about persevering beyond them. Their songs were clean and sharp in a way few hardcore songs are, that is, fit for arenas; but they were so without sacrificing the spirit of their hardcore roots. They fused the ethical precepts and flair for experimentation of mid-‘80s DC while framing it in the high-minded rigors of late-‘80s NYC. So you could say in that moment I was very much in the hopeful camp. In fact I went a bit further, seeing them in the broader American context. Turnstile made sense because Turnstile and the national cultural spirit go hand-in-hand. They are the great Emersonian apotheosis, correcting fully and completely away from doomed Nietzschean flights.

Now in 2025, with America poised to leap over the precipice again, and on purpose no less, the need for Turnstile is as great as ever. So why do I find myself on the other side of the fault line putting everything I liked about them into question? Knee-jerk contrarianism could account for it, but let’s assume I have valid reasons. Sure, NEVER ENOUGH sounds as promising as its predecessor, and seems more than capable to make good on those promises. But there’s a hollowness to it that is harder to overlook. If GLOW ON was a flirtation with pop aesthetics and scale, the follow-up appears to cement a marriage—much in the same way fallout follows an explosion. Turnstile is doing for punk what Deafheaven has done for metal: luxuriating it with a bricolage of tropes, triggering an automatic response with the feeling of momentum that falls short of its force.

A case in point is the free Baltimore show from over the weekend. Doubtless is it a thing that happened and doubtless the cause it was benefitting benefitted from it. The music was fresh and invigorating; the kids were free, wild, and stage-diving across the gender divide in the spirit of mutual respect. But so what? All I see are a bunch of videos online, and the one from the band itself is shot with a camcorder. While that is of the fashion, its use here shows why it’s better with nü cold wave bands and found footage horror. Because it lends to an uncanniness and distance that the iPhone camera, with all its own drawbacks, does not. It is beautiful in its flaws but exclusive in its reach. It draws you in while still keeping you at arm’s length. It’s not even that I’m watching a throwback, I’m watching a manufactured social enclosure. At the same time, it’s fair to put the question back to me as to whether it was ever going to look any other way.

Turnstile seems genuine in how they seek to do what all punk bands have sought to do: to fulfill its promises. Punk bands are always and everywhere trying to reach the absolute perfection of its worldview, even when imperfection is at the center of it. Each generation feels to some degree that it has met that promise, while every subsequent generation gives reason to think that those promises were not just unmet, but broken. There is nothing I’ve seen from Turnstile that I haven’t seen from Snapcase, Turning Point, Refused, Saetia, or At the Drive-in. Indeed, I can hardly complain about my own turn-of-the-millennium era that wrought “genre-defining” masterpieces at a monthly clip, many of which still hold up. But maybe all that creativity and innovation came with costs to community. We became so focused on aesthetic refinement and technical mastery that we skimped on the ethics. Efforts to create more inclusive, respectful, and, yes, safe spaces for all were half-hearted at best. In truth we were monocultural and insular, and we failed. Turnstile looks back at us and simply asks: “Why not have it all?”

That, at least, is how I’m reading it, and on that reading I’m not inclined to agree on every point. But from that perspective I can appreciate the refinement and the ambition. With all those ample resources they still do it themselves and retain an enviable degree of creative control. Perhaps the summer of 2025 will be as revolutionary as the summer of 1985. It seems worth trying to attain it, even if the endpoint to which it leads them has the skeletal remains of Red Hot Chili Peppers.