The Baltimore hardcore punk scene that gave the world Turnstile
Despite what those annoying, forced Turnstile haters will tell you, no one makes hardcore punk because of the money.
It’s only the top 1 per cent of hardcore punk acts that earn a solid, comfortable middle-class living from it. Which, granted, does make them rich in the eyes of most people in the world, but compared to the top 1 per cent of pretty much every other genre of pop music in the world, that’s nothing. There are horrorcore and chillwave artists with holiday homes in the Maldives, not so much with hardcore punk bands.
At least, until now. The genre has exploded in the past decade, and now a fistful of the most exciting rock bands in the world deal in breakdowns, blastbeats and performing live with a little second stage under the main one, specifically for stage divers.
Knocked Loose seem poised to challenge Slipknot for the crown of the heaviest band in the mainstream. Drug Church recently toured European arenas opening for Deftones. However, any discussion of hardcore punk’s ascendance to the mainstream has to focus on one band above all else.
Turnstile are a genuine phenomenon. A band winning Grammys, headlining festivals, making the most celebrated albums of the year and getting co-signed by Charli XCX. All this has meant that most dyed-in-the-wool punkers don’t think they’re a punk band anymore. Deep down, however, even those sneering gatekeepers have to admit that, at the very least, Turnstile came up as a hardcore band. Not only that, they came up in one of the most thriving scenes not only in punk, but in rock music in general.
Before they were the tastemakers punk band of choice, Turnstile were the crown jewel of the Baltimore hardcore scene.
Who else came through the Baltimore hardcore scene?
While never a nerve centre scene the way that New York, LA and even the nearby Washington DC were, the Baltimore hardcore scene was in on the ground floor of the genre. The likes of Lungfish and Half Japanese were the local heroes, ones that made inroads out of Maryland but never quite went national. The scene ticked along nicely over the 1990s, with the likes of Next Step Up and Stout keeping the home fires burning with a sound that was genuinely fearsome even in the context of hardcore punk.
However, the great leap forward didn’t come with Turnstile, but instead a Turnstile-adjacent band. You see, the Glow On hitmakers are no overnight success. They have miles on the clock, forming in 2010 as something of a side project. After all, singer Brendan Yates had a day job as the drummer for the first band to put the Baltimore hardcore scene on the national map, the mighty Trapped Under Ice.
I really do wish I could intellectualise this at least a little, but I can’t. Trapped Under Ice fuck like a plutonium-powered piledriver, and if you’re intrigued by the heavier end of the Turnstile sound, you owe it to yourself to listen with an open mind.
Punk scenes are nothing if not incestuous, and despite Turnstile forming as an offshoot of Trapped Under Ice, members of both eventually formed the equally righteous Angel Du$t.
These three bands have given the scene a new lease of life in the 2020s, and now a handful of the most exciting hardcore bands of this era are from the Baltimore scene. The likes of Cold Mega, End It, and Doubt prove that a scene’s biggest band breaking into the mainstream doesn’t necessarily mean the end of a hardcore scene. Not when there’s so much billious, breathtaking life in it yet.