No barricades, stage-diving, bloody fans: was this the wildest rock show ever?

Brendan Yates bursts onto the stage at Sydney’s Metro Theatre and immediately catapults into the crowd like a heat-seeking missile of communal love. Onstage, the rest of Turnstile churn through Birds, a hyper-highlight from their recent album Never Enough, with Jem Siow, frontman of Sydney’s own hardcore heroes Speed, whipping an already frenzied crowd into bone-shattering chaos.

Audience members somersault off the stage’s edge with wanton abandon. By the time the show ends, there will have been no less than four stoppages for injuries, all patiently and carefully tended to, including a lengthy pause after Blackout when two paramedics escort a teenager across the dance floor to sincere applause.

This is Turnstile in their element, a no-barricades show with all proceeds benefiting First Nations Response, a grassroots Aboriginal women-led organisation that provides food relief for Indigenous communities in Sydney’s inner city and Inner West. It’s a gig in size and sentiment that harks back to their salad days in the Baltimore hardcore underground.

Like mohawked lemmings, audience members clamber onstage, windmill furiously, then launch themselves into the roiling crowd below repeatedly. While Yates takes the show to the pit, the band – drummer Daniel Fang, bassist Franz Lyons, and guitarists Pat McCrory and Meg Mills – remain exceedingly tight and focused. It’s the eternal promise of live music: community, catharsis, oblivion, all at once.

The previous night at the Hordern Pavilion, Turnstile did the same, albeit in a more figurative sense. The sold-out venue, roughly four times larger than the Metro, demanded a barricade that prevented stage invasions (at least until the show’s epic closer). But the band had an ingenious solution for keeping things intimate by projecting the moshing and slam-dancing crowds as their visual backdrop. Highlighted on the screen were manic circle pits and headbanging faces gurning for the camera. The rooms may be bigger but, in the democratic tradition of hardcore, Turnstile’s goal remains the same: to remove the distance between the band and audience, by any means necessary.

“These shows have been amazing, the biggest we’ve ever played, but we still always look for opportunities to go side to side, as opposed to just, like, bigger and bigger,” Yates, 35, says. “We’re always trying to find that sweet spot of allowing as many people who want to come to the show as possible but also trying to maintain intimacy and environments that provide that shared catharsis. The mission is always: how do you mould the show to exactly how you want it to feel? Any opportunity to erase that barrier is the goal.”

Speaking to Yates in a cluttered office in the bowels of the Hordern barely two hours before the gig, I’m self-conscious of interrupting whatever ritual or routine he might have pre-show. When he’s performing, Yates prowls the stage like a tightly coiled prizefighter, pogoing on the spot or suddenly erupting into a flamboyant pirouette like a foot soldier in a kung fu film. Considering how taut his onstage demeanour is, I’m half expecting him to be doing reps backstage, intense zen meditation, slamming his fists into a brick wall repeatedly to get in the mood. Instead, he’s chill to the point of refrigerated, affable and soft-spoken, blue eyes piercing from under a baseball cap and the popped collar of a plaid shirt.

He’d usually just be listening to some music, he says. Or maybe he’ll read. He’ll do some breath work, vocal-warmups. Before tonight’s show, he thinks he’ll put on some Cocteau Twins. “There’s no, like, one thing,” he says. “You just want to feel like you’re not going in cold.”

The Hordern show is sardine-packed in a way the Hordern, an air hangar of a music venue, is never packed. Following 2021’s Glow On and last June’s Never Enough, Turnstile have become undeniably big, operating on a level they couldn’t have envisioned when Yates, then a drummer who’d never even sung before, first formed the band in 2010. In the decade of “is rock dead?” nothing suggested that an earnest act from a niche subculture would become a pop sensation.

“We’re just trying to embrace wherever we’re at, at any given point. There’s so much exciting stuff but there’s a lot of difficulties that come with it too,” says Yates of Turnstile’s burgeoning profile, the conundrum of where to play not the least of it. On the opening US leg of their current tour, they took to inventing their own spaces – setting up stages under bridges and highways – to cater to bigger audiences but maintain that specific Turnstile energy.

“There’s such a wide range of people coming to the shows now, babies to 80-year-olds,” says Yates. “That part is crazy to see. But it’s also exciting because, for me, getting into music and finding music, I just needed a gateway, an opportunity to see it. If us playing shows that are more accessible is an opportunity for people to come in and find that sense of community, it’s the coolest thing ever.”

A large part of Turnstile’s crossover appeal has been their inviting, anything-goes looseness. Across Never Enough and Glow On, the band come across like the Beach Boys of hardcore, imbuing their heavy riffs and righteous chants with jazz breakdowns, ambient club beats, a flute solo. Proving the playfulness with which they treat genres, they set a record ahead of next month’s Grammys when they became the first band to be nominated across rock, metal and alternative categories in the same year.

“We obviously never expected it, but the acknowledgement is just surreal,” says Yates of barnstorming an institution like the Grammys. “Growing up listening to metal and alternative and rock and punk, all these worlds and universes exist within our music. But to be nominated in all those categories, it’s kind of crazy to think about.”

At this point, the music’s just part of Turnstile’s lore. In an era of much mistrust and moral compromise, Turnstile has an ethos. Like their benefit show at Sydney’s Metro Theatre, in the past they’ve played fundraisers supporting Baltimore’s unhoused and donated merch sales to Palestinian refugees. Like the band itself – a multiracial collective in a genre that’s been traditionally white and male – their shows are diverse and inclusive. At the Metro show, as I hovered awkwardly behind a dude to grab a vantage spot, he quickly enquired if I could see from where I was standing and to let him know if I needed him to move over at all. The cynic in me was like, woah, take it easy! The human in me felt warm and safe.

And then there’s the tender sight of scores of sweaty men and women furiously slamdancing while chanting their desire for “a little TLC, a little TLC, a little TLC for me!” The riffs may be hard and aggressive and the lyrics speak of pain and alienation, but everything about Turnstile is welcoming.

No matter how big they become, Yates wants Turnstile to be for others what the bands of Baltimore’s hardcore scene were for him growing up. “My gateway into music was the radio, but the music on the radio was always this distant, imaginary thing. The first time I really felt it was when I went to a show at a local community centre and got to actually interact with the other 10 kids there,” he recalls.

“There’s a band playing, we’re moshing, and then I became friends with the band that was playing, and then you realise that you want to be a part of it, and you realise that you have something to offer because everyone has something to offer, and you find out that it’s actually tangible, that it’s not just this thing on MTV that you can never be a part of, that it’s something that’s very much at your front door if you need it. Turnstile is still that for me, and the band is still that outlet for us. That’s the reason for even writing the songs or playing every night.”

The band has even found itself labelled the “Nirvana of hardcore” for the extent to which they’ve shone a mainstream light on what’s long been a niche sound and subculture, in the way that Kurt Cobain did for grunge in the ’90s. Prior to Turnstile, hardcore’s last mainstream boom was in the Reagan years; you don’t need a degree in Dischord Records or Don Giovanni to recognise why a new generation is responding so strongly to the genre in today’s cultural climate.

“The world is a very beautiful but frustrating place, and I think a lot of people feel angry and feel the need for genuine connection and acceptance, or to find a safe space they might not find in more mainstream areas,” says Yates.

“Especially after the pandemic, and the world feeling like it was at the edge of your fingertips and slipping away from ever being able to find that kind of personal connection, I’ve definitely noticed a sense of urgency back and people wanting to get into a room like that and finding like-minded people or even just a safe space to let yourself just exhaust yourself from the things that are stuck inside that you don’t really know how to get out in other ways. There’s something very cathartic with engaging with the energy of the show and being able to come on the stage and sing and scream and climb on someone’s body and all these things, and I think it’s really important because I know it’s really important for me.”

In punk’s most deeply held corners, ambition is often a dirty word and Turnstile’s rise to mainstream darlings has bristled some. On Reddit threads and YouTube comments, hardcore traditionalists disown the band for pushing so far beyond the genre’s boundaries and, perhaps more so, for becoming so successful at it.

“I guess I can understand anyone’s opinion, but the world in which we came up on and we exist in has always been a pillar for us, and it’s still what our foundation is,” says Yates. “I think a lot of people get really stuck and obsessed on, like, sound. I don’t think it’s right or wrong, but it would be disingenuous for us to ever make music that didn’t feel like it was truly what we wanted to make and that’s what we’ve consistently done. People will connect with it or not, and that’s cool.”

In previous interviews, Yates said he’s copped such criticisms from hardcore purists since the beginning: people upset that he was writing love songs, or calling him a sissy because of the clothes he wore or the band’s use of colour in its aesthetics. It all reminds me of Jawbreaker’s Boxcar: “I was passing out when you were passing out your rules”. Does Yates get a kick out of challenging such rigid genre orthodoxies?

“Maybe subconsciously,” he smiles. “But not actively because I don’t think I would ever make a song just to provoke someone else. It always has to be genuine, what feels natural.” Anyway, he still thinks the band’s critics might one day come around. “The beautiful thing about music is oftentimes a window opens for you where it can hit you in the right place at the right time.”

During their stunning Metro gig, it’s fair to say everyone’s in the right place at the right time. Towards the end of the show, as the band launches into Never Enough’s Look Out for Me, Yates calls out to the crowd for someone to dance with him. By the end of the song, with its club beats blaring, roughly 200 people are bouncing in unison on stage and Yates is crowdsurfing across their shoulders. More than just a sight I’ll never forget, it’s communal catharsis achieved.

Never Enough is out now.

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