Brendan Yates, Turnstile’s frontman, a musical polymath who agonizes over every creative decision the group makes, already had a loose idea that the next album cover should be of a double rainbow and contain the color blue. So this was more than a little spooky. “I was like, ‘Yo, send me that file right now,’” he recalls.

In a way, the photo — which appears on the cover of Turnstile’s fourth studio album, NEVER ENOUGH, out this past summer — says a lot about where the group finds itself these days: in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, a cosmic testament to the goodness and tender hearts of the most famous hardcore band in the world.

The photo also happens to be the perfect metaphor for Turnstile itself: ROYGBIV in all its glory, each individual uniting to create something beautiful. And while the light’s refraction certainly won’t last, Turnstile just might.

Turnstile formed in 2010 when Yates, the drummer of Trapped Under Ice, an already popular Baltimore hardcore band, recruited a few of his closest friends to play some songs. In its current incarnation, it consists of longtime members Yates on vocals and keys, Lyons on bass, Pat McCrory on guitar, and Daniel Fang on drums. Meg Mills was recruited in 2023 from her own British hardcore outfit, Big Cheese, to replace guitarist Brady Ebert. Following their 2010 self-titled demo (the entirety of which you can find on YouTube), Turnstile released their debut EP, Pressure to Succeed, in April 2011. It’s fast and relentless, with a fierce undercurrent of suburban angst — prototypically hardcore in a lot of ways. The EP included the track “New Rules,” with Yates scream-shouting lyrics that are, in retrospect, something of a mission statement: 

“I have a burning in my heart to do the things that I want / and take my friends by the hand and take my friends to the top.”

It’s hard to argue that Turnstile hasn’t done exactly that. In no particular order, the band has: played Coachella; been shouted out onstage at Coachella by Charli XCX (“TURNSTILE SUMMER”); played the NPR Tiny Desk; performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon twice; toured arenas around the world with Blink-182; received a handful of Grammy nominations for their 2021 album, GLOW ON, a no-skips masterpiece of hardcore earworms adorned with floaty beeps and boops; released NEVER ENOUGH and its accompanying visual film to critical acclaim. Their fans were already rabid, and new ones continue to glom on like an all-powerful katamari. That Turnstile has been able to sustain this kind of adoration over four albums while maintaining fidelity to their hardcore roots is an accomplishment in and of itself; they are perhaps the only band I’ve ever seen live where the lead singer says, “Here’s a song off the new album…” and the crowd actually goes nuts. 

“I honestly think what people feel from Turnstile is authenticity,” says Madison Woodward, whose own band, Fury, toured with them early on. Woodward is the events manager for the LA-based clothing brand Brain Dead and organizes the Sound and Fury festival every year. “It comes across in their music and their aesthetic, and I think that everything is kind of put out into the world with a lot of love and a lot of thought. They’re not just throwing it out there; they’re putting time and effort into making the best thing they can.”

If you spend enough time in Turnstile’s orbit, a wordcloud that includes adjectives like “intentional” and “authentic” and “grounded” will start to materialize. Yates is the beating heart of the operation, a true music nerd (this is most evident on the semi-secret solo R&B and funk albums he put out in 2020 under the moniker Free the Birds), but part of Turnstile’s appeal is that none of its members compromise their individuality. Mills is a fashion head who studied costume design in London (her favorites are Maison Margiela, Vivienne Westwood, and Alexander McQueen); McCrory is a cinephile who used to skate a lot but now prefers fishing and golf (“I can’t risk the wrist anymore,” he says); Fang is soft-spoken and likes to work out, rock climb, and read; and Lyons, among other hobbies, is into Japanese streetwear. When I ask Lyons about the Mr. T-like stack of silver jewelry he’s been wearing around his neck as of late, he says that the star pendant necklace is from Carpet Company, a hometown brand, “and the rest of it…” — big grin — “it’s Chrome Hearts.”

The kind of fanaticism Turnstile inspires was evident at a June show at Brooklyn’s Under the K Bridge. The band premiered several songs off NEVER ENOUGH, playing with a lineup they helped curate that included Boy Harsher and Teezo Touchdown. The crowd was huge, somewhere in the ballpark of 9,000. There were old crusty goons with tattooed heads, skaters in baggy everything, TikTokers trying to ambush people, guys wearing WNBA jerseys, girls in Knocked Loose merch, dolls in leather pants, elementary-aged kids with their millennial parents, and at least two guys cosplaying as Akatsuki members from Naruto — all this despite the fact that it was 9 p.m. on a school night and 80-something degrees with nary a breeze.

I’d come straight from work and was carrying a laptop that I did not want to damage, so I bobbed my head on the outskirts of the crowd like a proper washed millennial. The last time I was in anything resembling a pit was maybe at a Converge show in 2013. And then, during the encore — for which Paramore’s Hayley Williams came out to sing “SEEIN’ STARS” — the opening bassline groove to “HOLIDAY” stirred something in the crowd. At least three concentric pits opened in tandem, engulfing much of the crowd, one swallowing me and my laptop alive like a sandworm from Dune.

While Turnstile has never been as overtly political as other bands from the DC-DMV area — themselves direct, progressive rejoinders to the uglier parts of Reaganism in the late ’70s and early ’80s — their early stuff fizzled with plenty of rage. The real throughline is their hardcore spirit of radical inclusivity, which is inherently regional and which, as the Brooklyn crowd demonstrated, is still pronounced in everything Turnstile does. It’s as though they took all the institutional anger and transmuted it into something posi.

“We were playing a set the other day, and there was a whole group of kids in the crowd that were cooperatively stretching out this huge banner, and I realized it was a Palestinian flag,” Fang says. “And the fact that they’re sharing that together amongst themselves and then want to share that with the band, a moment like that is such a jolting experience of, like, ‘I’m not here for them and they’re not here for me. We’re here together.’” Fang was raised in an autodidact household that reveals itself in the sophistication of his drumming. His older brother, in fact, is the revered investigative reporter Lee Fang, most recently of The Intercept. “My brother’s my hero,” Fang says. “He got me into hardcore. I think the subversive aspect of punk is a thing that he’s always had in him.” 

Mills was a big Turnstile fan before the opportunity to play with them came along, but it’s far from a Sublime with Rome situation, where a starry-eyed follower gets to join their favorite band. She had just finished up with the Leeds-based Big Cheese and was eager to tour and travel. “It’s a really cool situation, but I feel like it gets misrepresented in a way where people are like, ‘Oh my god, so you were a fan and they plucked you out of nowhere!’” Mills says, laughing. “And I’m like, ‘No, it’s hardcore! Everyone’s just friends with everyone forever!’” When I ask Yates why he thought Mills would be a good fit, he responds effusively: “She’s an amazing guitar player, first off. And I feel like when looking for someone to play in a group, there’s a lot of criteria. The most important thing is you want someone you like, someone who you’re going to be around a lot, work on things with, and have a shared collective consciousness with.”