#236 — Turnstile — GLOW ON (2021)
Hardcore punk never sounded like this.
Yeah, I didn’t see this one coming. It’s the second album on the list which has ALL CAPS as a stylisation, but this is very far away from Saba’s CARE FOR ME.
This album is great, probably the first entirely top-to-bottom great album on this list so far. I’ve enjoyed some others, but this one got a back-to-back-to-back playthrough — no skips, no stops.
This is a hardcore punk album but Turnstile have got the occasional element that literally jerks your head up to stare at the speaker and mouth “what the fuck are you doing?”.
Starting with some electronica scales which had me thinking this was going to be dance music, which we haven’t really had on this list yet. Then there’s dream pop/rnb song they drop in the middle of the album. The collaboration with Blood Orange, who you might know as a guy who wrote for Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s an album with hidden treats for the listener.
And it’s still punk. The riffs fucking crunch, the pace changes and the vocals are brutal. But it’s also ambitious, it experiments, but it never feels out of control.
The main track on here is that dreampop they drop called ALIEN LOVE CALL. A sinuous, reverb soaked drift with a bit of Tame Impala in there somewhere, which arrives sandwiched between fast, brutal hardcore punk tracks.
Mostly what this album is, is fun. Turnstile are having a fucking blast here, and it’s beautiful to see hardcore punk evolve into wherever these guys are going with it. I cannot wait to listen to their other stuff, to see how they got to this album and what they did next.
If anything this is an inversion of the Ashlee Simpson album. Almost any track on this album would make a great single, it’s of a consistent high quality that you can pull anything out of it and go ‘yeah, that’ll do’.
Turnstile — GLOW ON — 2021
Best Track: TLC (Turnstile Love Connection) — 1.42 of beautiful noise.
Underrated Banger: WLD WRLD. This is way too hard to choose, but this is one of the longest tracks on the album and sustains an energy you just don’t expect.
Find them on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5O_Y-RbtVJUEv4uLP-O8A
