Turnstile and the Room I Haven’t Entered Yet

BEFORE I SEE THEM

I’ve never seen Turnstile live. But after spending an unreasonable amount of time watching them play, they’ve become one of the bands I most need to experience from inside the room. “BIRDS” is a big part of the reason why.

I think I know the moment Turnstile became a band I had to see live.

It was Tiny Desk.

Which feels slightly strange to say.

Tiny Desk is usually where bands get smaller.

That is part of why I’ve always loved watching them. Take an artist who might normally be playing a giant stage, put them into that little office, bring everybody closer together and see what is left when some of the scale disappears.

Sometimes the songs get quieter.

Sometimes you notice something in an arrangement that gets buried on the record.

Sometimes you understand something about the artist that you hadn’t really understood before.

And sometimes the intimacy actually tells you something about what that artist might be like when you give them a much bigger room.

I remember feeling that way watching IDLES.

Their Tiny Desk opens with “Never Fight a Man With a Perm,” and everything I already liked about that band seemed to get concentrated into this tiny space.

The passion.

The anger.

That little sense of danger in the way they perform.

But also the feeling that there is something underneath all of it.

They have a point of view.

They seem like they mean every fucking bit of it.

I finished watching that and wanted to know what that energy felt like when you gave them a whole venue.

Watch IDLES — Tiny Desk Concert →

Turnstile’s Tiny Desk did something completely different to me.

The Tiny Desk That Put Them on My List

TURNSTILE — Tiny Desk Concert

What became clearer in that small room wasn’t how heavy Turnstile could be.

It was how much the people around them matter.

By the time they get to “BIRDS,” the audience doesn’t feel like a group of people who happened to get invited into the office to watch Turnstile play.

They are part of it.

Brendan Yates is on the desk.

People are packed around the band.

Eventually he is diving into them.

But even before any of that, there is this feeling that whatever Turnstile are doing isn’t supposed to stop at the edge of the performance space.

It moves outward.

Into everybody else.

And I think that is what finally clicked for me.

Because Turnstile could be an easy band to misunderstand if all you saw was a few seconds of footage.

Fast music.

Heavy guitars.

People crashing into each other.

A pit going off.

From the outside, somebody could look at that and see anger.

I watch Turnstile and see almost nothing but joy.

That is the thing.

That is what their Tiny Desk brought into focus for me.

Not that the intensity isn’t real.

It obviously is.

But underneath all of it is this incredible sense of community.

People want to be in it together.

The crowd doesn’t feel like something Turnstile performs in front of.

It feels like part of who Turnstile are.

And watching that happen inside one of the most intimate live-music formats we have made me want to know what happens when you give them thousands of people instead.

I Have Watched Turnstile Live an Embarrassing Amount for Someone Who Has Never Seen Turnstile Live

Festival sets.

Professional live videos.

Clips filmed from somewhere in the middle of a crowd.

Phones held up while everything around them appears to be falling apart.

I have watched a lot of Turnstile.

Just never from the place that actually matters.

Inside the room.

And the more I watch them, the more I realize I spend almost as much time looking at the crowd as I do the band.

There are bodies everywhere.

People jumping.

Crowdsurfing.

Running into one another.

Flying over one another.

Screaming every word back toward the stage.

Basically all the visual evidence somebody could use to convince themselves a hardcore show looks terrifying.

Except that isn’t what I keep seeing.

I see people smiling.

Constantly.

People look fucking delighted.

That has become the thing I associate with Turnstile live more than almost anything else.

Joy.

Not polite concert happiness.

Not somebody standing there nodding along because their favourite song came on.

Release.

People completely giving themselves over to the thing.

And every time I see it, I think the same thing.

I need to know what that feels like from inside the room.

Hardcore Can Look Like One Thing From the Outside

I understand why somebody looking at thirty seconds of hardcore footage might think:

Absolutely fucking not.

The pit can look aggressive.

Stage diving can look aggressive.

People colliding with one another can definitely look aggressive.

But the longer I watch Turnstile, the less aggression is what I see.

I see people letting go.

I see participation.

I see people being given permission, for however long the song lasts, to stop standing still and behaving normally.

Someone goes down and somebody pulls them back up.

Someone dives and hands appear underneath them.

People smash into each other and somehow the whole thing looks less like violence than a room full of people agreeing that the normal rules have been suspended for a little while.

And Turnstile themselves have been talking about that relationship for years.

Back in 2018, Brendan Yates described what separated hardcore and punk for him in terms of the connection between the band and the crowd — “the community.” He also talked about wanting to blur the normal boundary where the band occupies one space and the audience another. NME

Years later, even as Turnstile became dramatically bigger, that hadn’t disappeared.

Yates told Pitchfork in 2025 that his understanding of hardcore wasn’t fundamentally about one prescribed sound.

It was still about community. Pitchfork

And watching Turnstile, that doesn’t feel like some philosophical explanation somebody added afterward.

You can literally see it.

The band is onstage.

But the show is happening everywhere.

And Then There Is “BIRDS”

“BIRDS” is on Turnstile’s 2025 album NEVER ENOUGH, released June 6, 2025.

I already loved the song.

But somewhere between the Tiny Desk and all of the live footage I’ve watched since, the song became tied to these crowds in my head.

Now I find it difficult to separate the two.

Especially one line:

“These birds not meant to fly alone.”

Seven words.

And somehow they feel like a picture of Turnstile live to me now.

I don’t know exactly what Brendan Yates meant when he wrote them.

And honestly, I don’t really need to.

That is one of the things music gets to do.

Someone writes something from wherever they are.

Then it reaches somebody else and starts attaching itself to their life instead.

Yates has talked before about leaving enough room in songs for listeners to find their own meaning. The Guardian

This is where I found mine.

I don’t hear “BIRDS” as freedom meaning getting away from everybody.

I hear almost the opposite.

You get free of something.

You figure something out about yourself.

And then you find other people.

Maybe release doesn’t have to be solitary.

Maybe freedom opens outward.

Maybe you don’t have to fly alone.

And once I started hearing the song that way, all those Turnstile crowds became impossible for me to separate from it.

Thousands of people throwing themselves into the same song.

Screaming the same words.

These birds not meant to fly alone.

Come on.

I need to hear that in the room.

Watch the Crowd

If you want to understand what I mean, don’t just watch Turnstile in this video.

Watch everybody else.

TURNSTILE — “BIRDS” live

Look at the faces.

That is what I keep seeing.

Yes, there is complete chaos in places.

Yes, people are smashing into one another.

But look at how fucking happy everyone seems to be.

That combination is incredibly appealing to me.

Because I can sit here and write about hardcore and participation and community and collective experience all I want.

The much simpler truth is:

That looks like an incredible place to be.

I want to know what happens when “BIRDS” stops being something coming through my speakers and becomes thousands of people screaming it at the same time.

I want to know what it sounds like when the voice beside mine isn’t Brendan Yates coming through a recording.

It is some stranger standing next to me.

I want to know if the thing I think I can see in these videos is actually there.

This Is CONNECT to Me

If I was putting “BIRDS” somewhere inside Music Is Mood, this is CONNECT.

But not the soft version of connection we usually picture when we use that word.

This isn’t two people quietly understanding one another.

This is loud.

Sweaty.

Physical.

Somebody knocks into you.

Somebody else grabs you.

Maybe someone loses a shoe.

Everybody screams the same line.

There are a lot of ways people can remind each other:

You are part of this.

Apparently one of them is a breakdown.

And Then They Played “BIRDS” on SNL

Since finding Turnstile — and especially since “BIRDS” really got its hooks into me — I have had an unreasonable number of very loud, very solo singalongs in the car.

The kind you save for when nobody else is there.

No passengers.

No witnesses.

Just me, the volume probably higher than it needs to be, yelling along without having to worry about whether anybody else can hear how terrible I sound.

“BIRDS” has become one of those songs.

And all the while, I had been sitting on this article.

Thinking about it.

Reworking it.

Wondering when I should publish it.

Probably overthinking the whole thing, if we’re being honest.

Then Turnstile showed up on Saturday Night Live and played “BIRDS.”

And there I was again.

Goosebumps.

Watching a song I had been screaming by myself in the car suddenly happening live on one of the biggest television stages in the world.

And I had this almost ridiculous urge to start jumping around my living room.

By myself.

Which, when you think about it, is a very strange little display of unity.

Nobody else in the room.

Thousands — millions, potentially — of other people watching somewhere else.

And somehow I still felt pulled into it.

That is Turnstile again.

That is “BIRDS” again.

A completely different room.

A television studio instead of a festival field or packed club.

Everything more controlled.

Everything where it is supposed to be.

And somehow I’m still watching the same band trying to push beyond the space they have been given.

The SNL performance didn’t suddenly teach me something new about Turnstile.

It just brought all of this back to the surface at exactly the right moment.

The Tiny Desk.

The crowds.

“BIRDS.”

All those stupidly loud drives by myself.

The ridiculous amount of live footage I have watched.

That feeling that there is some part of this band I still don’t completely understand because I haven’t experienced them with other people.

And I remember thinking:

Well. I guess I’m finishing the Turnstile article.

At just after midnight on a now very early Sunday morning (for those of us watching SNL “live” on the West Coast).

Because fuck.

I really need to see them.

The Problem With Watching Great Live Footage

The irony in all of this is that the reason I want to see Turnstile so badly is because there is so much great footage of them.

I know what their shows look like.

I know what the crowds do.

I can watch them at festivals halfway around the world from my couch.

That is incredible.

It is also not remotely the same thing.

A camera can show me somebody hitting the floor.

It can’t tell me what the floor feels like when everybody jumps.

It can show me the crowd exploding.

It can’t put me inside it.

It can capture Daniel Fang hitting the drums.

It can’t put that hit in my chest.

And there are all these smaller things no video can answer.

What does the room feel like thirty seconds before they come out?

Who ends up standing beside you?

Is the pit actually intimidating once you are there?

Do I want to be right in the middle of it?

Or am I going to discover extremely quickly that my ideal Turnstile experience is approximately six people further back?

I genuinely don’t know.

And I like that I don’t know.

That is what I want from seeing them.

The part I can’t already watch on YouTube.

I Want to Write This Before I Know

That is also why I wanted to get this piece down now.

Because eventually, hopefully, this article expires.

One day I will actually see Turnstile.

And then I won’t get to wonder about any of this anymore.

The imaginary version of the show disappears.

It gets replaced by whatever actually happened.

So before that happens, here is what I think I’m going to find.

I think the physical intensity is going to feel far more joyous from inside the room than it sometimes looks from outside.

I think I’m going to understand Turnstile differently after seeing that relationship between the band and the crowd happen in real time.

I think the audience is going to matter almost as much as the people onstage.

And right now, if you asked me which song is going to be the moment, I would say “BIRDS.”

I could be completely wrong.

Maybe another song destroys me.

Maybe I finally see them and realize I have spent all this time projecting something onto other people’s concert videos that isn’t actually there.

Maybe I get into the middle of the crowd and think:

This is fucking incredible.

Maybe five minutes later I think:

Nope.

Back we go.

Good.

That is kind of the point.

Before I See Them

I think there are other bands I want to write about from this exact place.

Before I see them.

Before reality gets involved.

Not because I want to build some ranking of the greatest live bands in the world.

How the hell would I know?

I haven’t seen them.

What interests me is the space before that.

What makes you watch somebody perform and decide the recording isn’t enough anymore?

What makes you believe there is something happening in that room that you can see but still can’t access?

With Turnstile, I think I know.

It’s the people.

It’s the way the crowd never looks separate from the band.

It’s the fact that music that can look aggressive from the outside somehow feels overwhelmingly joyful to me.

It’s all those people throwing themselves into it and looking impossibly happy while they do.

And it’s “BIRDS.”

A song I already loved that now feels incomplete to me without imagining thousands of other voices inside it.

I haven’t seen Turnstile yet.

I have watched the room from outside for long enough.

I want to get in.

And, genuinely, thank you to SNL for getting the clips up fast enough to help turn this into a very late-night publishing decision.

Sources / Further Reading

• Turnstile — NEVER ENOUGH release information
• NME — Brendan Yates on hardcore, audience participation and community
• Pitchfork — Brendan Yates on Turnstile, hardcore and community
• The Guardian — Yates on community and leaving space for listener interpretation
• Saturday Night Live — Turnstile performing “BIRDS”
• NPR Music — Turnstile: Tiny Desk Concert
• NPR Music — IDLES: Tiny Desk Concert
• Turnstile — live performance of “BIRDS”