Riot Magazine

Meet Turnstile, the hardcore band taking the internet by storm

Last Friday, Baltimore based cult followed hardcore band Turnstile released their album, ‘GLOW ON’. The bands now gone from dominating an underground circuit to now one of Twitter’s favourite talking points. The band was formed in 2010 based in Baltimore’s emerging hardcore scene at the time, and are now sitting at five EPs and three studio albums.

Turnstile began the album rollout for ‘GLOW ON’ they released package single, or mini EP, ‘Turnstile Love Connection’. A collection of four tracks, packaged as a mini project and teaser for the forthcoming longer record alongside a gorgeous short film directed by the bands vocalist, Brendan Yates. This mini-project was their first release since their 2018 record, ‘Time and Space’.

The film opens with ‘HOLIDAY’, a heavy hardcore ballad. Sharp guitar riffs pair with evocative vocals, with its ethos an attempt to find peace in the eternal unknown that is existence. It says a lot about their ethos as a band, they’ve always rejected the notion of normal. Including, the genre boundaries, and glass ceilings associated with their much beloved, and always appreciative of Baltimore. From sitting on the Billboard charts, now on a major label to New York Times and other publications.

While they’ve always been tapping and seeing through the cracks of hardcores glass ceiling, it was this release that smashed the ceiling into a million of pieces. From sitting on the Billboard charts, now on a major label under Roadrunner, and support from the likes of Pitchfork, The New York Times, The Guardian, you name it, the band began to light the internet by storm.

Then came the record, ‘GLOW ON’, which is currently taking the internet by storm. Take critical reviews from the likes of Pitchfork giving the album an 8.4, NME 5 stars, or an Anthony Fantano review of 8. I personally have never listened to hardcore music or its associated genres, but there’s something about ‘GLOW ON’ that sticks out as differen from the norm.

The band enlisted Mike Elizondo, known as Dr Dre’s prodigy to co-produce the record alongside lead singer, Brendon Yates. They also collaborate on the record with Blood Orange for two tracks. On the albums closer, they return the creative exchange, with Hynes entering the hardcore world of Turnstile, a sound he hasn’t touched or been involved with since his band, Test Icicles. The film opens with ‘HOLIDAY’, a heavy hardcore ballad. Sharp guitar riffs pair with evocative vocals, with its ethos is existence.

A taste of

Washington punk

Ataround 11:30 p.m. on a coldnight roughly ten years ago, I begged my mom to let me go to the pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong with my dad. My uncle’s band, Adrian H and the Wounds, performed that night at the local venue in Northwest Washington, D.C. After much convincing, I attended my first-ever concert in my 2013 Tumblr-era skinny jeans and black converse high tops. I remember going backhround. I remember going backstage to greet my uncle but, unfortunately, did not enjoy his heavy, dark, industrial music at the ripe age of ten.

When my friends and I decided to attend a show by local acts Thee Deluxe, Destructo Disk, and Teen Mortgage on February 17th, I was excited to return to Comet Ping Pong after all these years. We arrived late to Thee Deluxe’s set but managed to catch the very end. Destructo Disk, a Richmond-based band I had heard of through Spotify-automated recommendations but had not yet experienced live, followed them up. They came out with great energy that kept the audience unwaveringly engaged, even throwing out Slim Jims to audience members when they found too many in their guitar cases.

The next band to play was Teen Mortgage, a Washington, D.C.-based duo. They entered the stage to a loud backtrack and immediately started playing heavy rock music. My favorite part about punk rock is how short the songs usually are; I love a good minute-and-a-half-long pocket of energy about the simple things in life. Teen Mortgage, for example, explained that one brief piece was about getting high at work, followed by a track about why you need to get high at work. No one could understand any of the words, but something about seeing the chaotic genre live made all of the nonsense make sense.

SWMRS is making waves

The band was formed by Cole Becker and Joey Armstrong after watching School of Rock together in school.Becker’s brother, Max Becker, later joined the band to play bass. The band was originally named the Raining Souls, but they briefly changed to the Clocks. After realizing there were already many bands with the same name, they changed it to Emily’s Army in honor to Becker’s cousin Emily, who suffers from cystic fibrosis and was diagnosed in 1998.Their goal was to raise money and create more awareness for cystic fibrosis. In 2008, they released a set of songs on their MySpace page under the album name This Kid. Although This Kid is not an official studio album, a few of these songs appeared throughout their career, including “Burn Apollo” that was re-recorded on their debut album, Queens being played live in 2012, and “I Need to Be Fixed” played live during Warped Tour 2012.

The band played many small shows and festivals in California during this time. In 2009 the band added guitarist Travis Neumann whose first appearance was on the band’s 2009 EP, Goody Two Shoes. that was followed by the release of two more EPs, Broadcast This and Regan MacNeil. The band spent all of 2010 working and recording their first studio album with Green Day frontman and Joey’s father, Billie Joe Armstrong.[citation needed] In 2011, the band released their first full-length album, Don’t Be a Dick, on June 14 through Adeline Record company.

Punk trickled out from the 1960s garage rock scene as a means of drowning out the preceding hippie movement and rebelling against how commercial and bloated rock’n’roll had become.

When many people dismissed it as noise from angry teenagers, others interpreted the defiant din as the musical score of the current anti-establishment youth generation.

Punk in the USA is said to have been fully realised in 1974 in New York City’s CBGB music club. As the name suggests, the Country, BlueGrass and Blues club didn’t intend to introduce a new genre of music, but the Ramones and Blondie performed there, and they had other plans.

Likewise across the pond in England. With unemployment and frustration high in the UK, there were a lot of opinions and a lot of steam that needed to be vented; punk was the perfect remedy. and added John Lydon and Sex Pistols.

Originally billed as the “Psychedelic Stooges” and debuting in Detroit on Halloween night in 1967, the Stooges are arguably the first-ever punk band.

Although their look and sound weren’t quite what punk would become known for, their attitude and presence, especially Iggy Pop’s, were textbook punk rock.

Some who witnessed Iggy’s behaviour while performing thought he was a man possessed. His raw, chaotic energy was something many hadn’t seen before, which was why they couldn’t take their eyes off him.

As well as being credited with the popularisation of stage diving, Iggy was also known to cut himself with glass, flash his genitalia at the crowd, and smear his bare chest with hamburger meat and peanut butter whilst on stage.

Green Day - Dookie

“I try to keep punk rock punk. You’re not getting a nice story out of me.”

ONE ON ONE WITH FAT MIKE

I know you’ve been doing a lot of press lately. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time you were so willing to do interviews was the War On Errorism/Punk Voter era. Why have you deiced to do so much press for this album?

Fat Mike: Well I think between our book and the album, that I actually have things to talk about. Where when we took the eight year break, it was kind of when punk was getting big. And it was the same f*cking questions every day and people didn’t really know who the band was.

Well I want to ask about the album right off the bat. Because this doesn’t sound like a 13th album from a band that’s 33 years old. It sounds more like a debut album from a young band ready to take on the world. How do you keep the fire in your belly after so many years going?

Fat Mike: Well thank you very much, that’s a very nice compliment. And it’s really hard to stay relevant after thirty years. And that’s why I did The Decline twenty years ago. But I wanted to do something no one else had done, and really push. And even though I think our last few records have been good records, this one it seems is really touching people, in a way none of ours have before.

Well I think you’ve accomplished that this time around. Whatever you’ve done with your albums, there’s always that mix of originality and recognition.

Fat Mike: What a lot of people don’t notice about us, is our most popular songs don’t have choruses. Like ‘Linoleum’ or ‘Bob’, there’s no choruses. No band does that.

Yeah, no punk band. That’s more of a hip hop thing.

Fat Mike: Yeah. And also, like the chord progression in ‘Generation Z’, that’s a f*cking gnarly chord progression. Sixteen chords in the verse. Punk bands don’t do that, they use four chords. The only band that kind of does it is Bad Religion, in some of their songs.

Is that your daughter at the end of ‘Generation Z’? Doing the background vocals?

Fat Mike: that’s Darla and also Tony Sly’s daughter Fiona Sly. My stepdaughter reads the poem at the end.

Well what I love about this song, and about your band, is that I often think I know what direction a song is headed in, then it goes somewhere else. I think ‘Generation Z’ is a good example of that. ‘California Drought’ is another.

Fat Mike: I think ‘California Drought’ has a guitar rhythm that no one’s ever heard before. I could be wrong.

Yeah it’s weird. The timing is very, it’s almost disorienting.

Fat Mike: It took me an hour and a half of just sitting there drinking, with a guitar and a guitar amp, trying to come up with a new rhythm. You know kind of like how ‘Linoleum’ was twenty-five years ago. So I kept playing and kept playing, and then I heard it. Then it took me twenty minutes to figure out what I did. Then when I taught the band, the band was like ‘what the f*ck?’ I also threw in some ragtime chords in parts last time.

It’s nice that you can still surprise your audience half a dozen times in an album. It’s fun for the fans and it has to be fun for you as well.

Fat Mike: Thank you, that really means a lot to me. Our last album was not surprising, just a solid NOFX album, this one is out of left field.

Yeah and after all you’ve done; the book, the stage play, the band, the side projects. It always seems to be embraced by your fanbase. Do you have the best fans in the world?

Fat Mike: Well, we do have good fans, but they don’t stick with us because of that. I think it’s because our book is brutally honest, and no one’s written a book like that. And we put out solid records. I mean I care a lot about putting out quality products. When we were talking about doing the book, I said that I don’t want to do a book unless we’re all going to f*cking tell everything. Because bands have all those stories, bands have amazing stories; it’s just that we’re telling them. We’re telling things that are uncomfortable, are going to hurt, and our kids are going to suffer. You know, my daughter might get teased, ‘your dad’s a piss drinker’. Yup thats how it is.

Plus, whether your daughter gets teased or not, which I would hope isn’t the case, what if you hadn’t released this book, or toned it down for her sake? When she’s older she might wonder why you wimped out and gotten more upset with you for holding back right now.

Yeah and after all you’ve done; the book, the stage play, the band, the side projects. It always seems to be embraced by your fanbase. Do you have the best fans in the world?

Fat Mike: Well, we do have good fans, but they don’t stick with us because of that. I think it’s because our book is brutally honest, and no one’s written a book like that. And we put out solid records. I mean I care a lot about putting out quality products. When we were talking about doing the book, I said that I don’t want to do a book.

Fat Mike: Yeah and I told both my daughters, that when you turn eighteen you can never read this book, because, they don’t want to read it. You know what’s cool is, my daughter Darla, she’s twelve and she saw us play in L.A. last year and I was dressed in slutty clothes and she said ‘Dad, I know you wear dresses, but you look like a stripper’.

So it’s the norm.

Fat Mike: Yeah, but it’s not just the norm, it’s like living your lifestyle openly and freely. It may seem weird, but it should be the norm. We’re the ones living how we want to live.