One of the coolest things about witnessing Turnstile's rise has been watching the band figure out how to play music intended for a specific context -- the type of hardcore show where so many people stagedive that two different divers often land right on top of each other -- in different situations, like giant festival stages or late-night talk shows. Next week, Turnstile will kick off a big North American tour where they'll headline an amazing, carefully selected bill. Today, we get to watch them reinvent their sound and style enough to play a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR's offices in Washington, DC.
The headline of this post is a bit reductive. Turnstile did a lot of things before frontman Brendan Yates executed what the YouTube description assures me is the first-ever Tiny Desk stagedive. The band recently released their excellent album Never Enough, in which they push their sound forward while maintaining continuity with their past records. Turnstile actually already played a Tiny Desk Concert in 2022, but that was when bands were still doing the Live From Home thing. In the latest Tiny Desk video, the band goes into the NPR studio for real, and they play a bunch of Never Enough songs, adding a pianist and a couple of horn players to their lineup. The tweaks are fun and interesting, and they never interfere with the songs' momentum. The set is a blast even before its grand finale.
Brendan Yates is an extremely physical frontman, and he's also the best stagediver I've ever seen in person. Through the set, you can see him trying to jump around in the small amount of space that the Tiny Desk venue allows. But the band's friends and supporters clearly got the memo that they were supposed to mosh around and have fun during "Birds," the closing song. (Shout out to NPR's Lars Gotrich, who I actually met at Turnstile's Time & Space record release show and who's very recognizable down front.) Near the end of "Birds," Yates does a Spider-Man leap to the top of the desk and then flips into the crowd of friends. It's fun to watch.
This isn't like Fear bringing Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins and John Brannon in to scare the Saturday Night Live studio audience, and it's not like Fucked Up trashing one of the bathrooms at the MTV studio in Toronto. It's a lot more wholesome than that. Turnstile aren't trying to destroy anything. They're just figuring out how to bring a certain energy into unlikely places, and this is one of the great examples. Watch it below.
The Tiny Desk Concerts are on a very fun run right now. Just a few days ago, the platform shared PinkPantheress' unbelievably charming entry in the series. PinkPantheress performs with a live band, doing jazzy renditions of her clubby songs and cycling through a ton of them in a compressed period. She says again and again how nervous she was to perform without any tuner on her voice for the first time, and she sounds great.
Turnstile's Never Enough is out now on Roadrunner. PinkPantheress' Fancy That is out now on Warner.
