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Togetherness and solitude, jackets so big you can escape inside of them, AM/FM cassette-deck memories & more with Turnstile's Brendan Yates
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When Brendan Yates co-founded Turnstile, back in 2010, he was a drummer who’d never sung before. Today he’s one of the great rock belters — even if he says he still doesn’t feel like a singer — and Turnstile are one of the great American genre-bending bands.
Their new album, Never Enough, came out last month, and it’s a beast. One moment the music is tightly wound and pummeling, the next it’s spacious and windswept; there’s frenzy and stillness, ugliness and beauty, anxiousness and openness, despair and joy. Half-time grinds give way to bright bursts of New Wave, cloudlike ambient passages, some cello from Dev Hynes, guest vocals from Spyfriends Faye Webster and Hayley Williams, some sneaky production from A.G. Cook, and a lovely flute solo from Shabaka Hutchings. The wildest thing about the album might be how laser-focused it feels despite all these moving parts.
Turnstile came out of Baltimore’s hardcore scene and they remain deeply enmeshed in it. What we admire about them besides their music is the way they embody hardcore’s communitarian ethos: They dissolve the line between the stage and the crowd, they’ve played benefit shows for homeless outreach in Baltimore and donated merch sales to Palestinian refugees and Puerto Rico hurricane relief. Their energy overall is accepting, nurturing and kindvibed. The new album’s title song is about how there’s never enough love.
Brendan co-directed a 50-minute film to accompany Never Enough, and it rips, too. (After an initial theatrical release, it might be streaming by the time you read this.) There’s a ton of sick sequences in it, including one stunner involving hundreds of stuffed animals, an explosion, and a jet ski — a little Mike Kelley, a little Zabriskie Point, a little Kenny Powers.
Also very important from the Blackbird Spyplane POV? Everyone in the band — Brendan, drummer Daniel Fang, bassist Franz Lyons, guitarists Meg Mills and Pat McCrory — looks cool and has swag.
The other day I (Jonah) was very stoked to get on a SpyLink Transmission with Brendan to talk about solitude and togetherness, escaping into big jackets like they’re igloos, what stayed with him after drowning in the ocean, the bygone magic of a childhood featuring an AM/FM cassette deck, and more unbeatable topics.
Blackbird Spyplane: You do something throughout the Never Enough movie that I really love: You show us empty spaces, then you show us the same spaces with one person in them, and then you show us the same spaces with a bunch of people in them, filling the frame. The images of the people all alone look cool, but there’s something about them that feels incomplete — when there’s a crowd, it feels transcendent. Talk about that decision to oscillate between images of solitude and images of people together…
Brendan Yates: “I was thinking about the passage of time, how things change and stay the same, and I was thinking about the idea of this infinite universe being around you, and how that can make you feel lonely, or it can make you feel like you’re part of something really big. Every song kind of goes to a different universe, but I also wanted them all to be part of one collective universe.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Turnstile has a commitment, in a bunch of ways, to the notion of community — not in the torched sense that every brand talks about “community” these days, but in the real sense of how good it feels to be in the world doing things with other people. I think that really connects right now, when more and more of life feels isolated, virtual and fragmented, and when it can feel like everybody’s just trying to sell something to everybody else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Turnstile got bigger than ever right after Covid lockdowns, when you toured Glow On with these big, intensely physical, open-armed shows.
Brendan Yates: “Growing up in the scene and culture we grew up in is a big part of it. And when I think community, I don’t only think, like, Big Social Events. I think about hardcore shows where even if you pull up by yourself, there’s an unspoken You can be here and You belong here. You don’t have to be the best speaker or the most social person, it’s community in the sense that you can show up, stay in the back of the room and still feel comforted by the music and by being part of something that’s bigger than any one person — an energy everyone’s sharing.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I read that you drowned off a surfer beach in the Pacific Ocean a decade ago, and some locals saved your life. I had a gnarly bike crash a few years ago where I blacked out and broke a bunch of bones — I don’t know how close I came to dying, but for a while afterward, the idea of death didn’t frighten me the same way it used to. I used to feel this chill thinking about it, but I started to feel more of a calm. What’s stayed with you from your experience?
Brendan Yates: “I actually felt similar to what you’re describing. It created a strange sense of calm, and peace, and reflection. And almost hyper-consciousness: Typically you have that feeling of going unconscious where you’re in a dream state, but this one, I felt very present. It sounds traumatic, and it was in a way, but I connect it to the themes of the new album — feeling like a small speck in a massive universe, that perspective change. I’ll carry that with me for the rest of my life, applying it to situations of loneliness and helplessness and grief. There’s a comfort in zooming out from worrying about every little thing to where you’re just a speck. Like, ‘Let me just breathe, because nothing else matters.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: That sounds something like ego death. But it’s probably more fun to drop acid than drown.
Brendan Yates: “I think so.”
Blackbird Spyplane: On a lighter note, there’s this white reggae dude who posted a 36-second cover of Turnstile’s “Mystery” to IG. There’s something obviously funny about it, but it also kind of goes — it demonstrates how sturdy the songwriting is on that song. “Mystery” is so good that I even love it in IG white-reggae form, is basically what I’m saying. Has that cover crossed your radar?
Brendan Yates: “Oh, that’s cool. I’ve seen other ones, like string-quartet covers and stuff like that, but I haven’t seen that one.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I’m curious — everyone in Turnstile seems to dress pretty cool, in different ways. Do you think a lot about what you’re putting on?
Brendan Yates: “I don’t think about it a lot, no. Really the only thing I want at this point is to be comfortable. I wanna get rid of all my clothes except for 10 shirts that fit me well, you know? I don’t care about graphics or brands. It’s just, ‘Find something you love and wear it for a year straight.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: Well you’ve got good instincts, then, because nothing looks better than something you’ve worn a ton, and also it’s not like you’re just tossing on random s--t, looking crazy. Like, you wore a very sick plaid anorak in the photos that Kyle Myles took for this last run of press Turnstile did. It looks like vintage Gap. Erin and I saw that, like, “Damn that’s a good piece.”
Brendan Yates: “I just thrifted that. I think it is old Gap. Since I was young, I’ve loved big jackets like that — when I got to school, before the bell rang, I could sit there with my CD player, in the igloo of my jacket. Be inside it, in my own little world. I still love a jacket I can escape inside of. Even this hoodie I’m wearing right now, this was my dad’s. I stole it from him in high school. It’s just a Hanes zip hoodie, but there’s something to be said for wearing anything for 20 years. It’s a whole different ballpark.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right, finally, I asked you to share a cherished possession with us, and you chose a little ‘90s-era Sony tape deck. What’s the story?
Brendan Yates: “This is really important to me. It’s a Sony CFS-B11 ‘Radio Cassette-Corder,’ a tape player with an AM/FM radio. I think this was a hand-me-down I got when I first got into music. Every birthday or Christmas all I’d ask for is blank tapes, so I could record songs from the radio. I’d go to any station, just spend all day like that, obsessively. Even when I’d go outside to play with my friends, I’d run back in when the ads were ending to press record. I made hundreds of mixtapes with this, and I knew what song was on every tape. It’s still my main cassette player.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I spent so many hours as a kid doing the exact same thing. I wrote an essay last fall about it, and about this way of relating to music that was so specific to that era:
Brendan Yates: “I wonder what it would be like if I was a kid now, with streaming, and how accessible any full album is — back then it was, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna get.’ You were almost, like, collecting Pokemon cards, hoping for a rare one. When you finally got a certain song, the feeling was so powerful, because now you had a recording you could go back to any time you wanted.
“It definitely enhanced the imagination, too, because radio would only play certain singles from every band, so it left you to your imagination of, ‘What does this band look like?’ ‘What does the rest of the album sound like?’ By the time you went to the library or the store and heard the whole thing, you’d already created this world, created all this context, and it made the songs sound so magical.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I remember hearing Sonic Youth’s “100%” on 92.3 in New York, loving it, then going out and buying the Dirty cassette. I was like 11 years old, and as poppy as that was for a Sonic Youth album, I was not ready for it. But I’d paid an enormous amount of money for it, maybe $9, so I was, like, ‘I am going to listen to this on repeat and try to teach myself how to hear it.’ Whereas these days you might just throw something unfamiliar on streaming, think, ‘Eh, I’m not feeling it,’ and just move on and never think about it again.
Brendan Yates: “It’s hard to say if it’s better or worse. Maybe having more music at my fingertips as a kid would have expanded my universe and put me on to all these other inspiring things. But I do think about how the idea of an album might be less important to society generally now, and to how we digest music. When we were making Never Enough, we made it in an exact order, like, ‘This song flows into this song,’ even though we were, like, ‘No one’s got the patience to listen to this in one sitting, and no one has time to then watch a movie.’ But it didn’t matter, because that’s what we wanted to do.”
Blackbird Spyplane: It didn’t matter, because you had to.
Brendan Yates: “We had to!”
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Kind of over "visual albums" in general but excited to check this one out. Yates is a legitimately interesting filmmaker. Every single scene in the "Birds" video has the juice.
I always appreciated this dude’s style. Seems very natural and genuine. It’s becoming harder to see that, in our influencing world. I envy that zen way of just holding on to a few items that you love and living a simple life.