Turnstile walked into Phantom Studios in Gallatin, Tennessee in the summer of 2020 with a producer best known for working with Eminem and Fiona Apple, and they came out with the most talked-about hardcore record in years. GLOW ON, released August 27, 2021 on Roadrunner Records, is the Baltimore band's third full-length. It does not sound like a compromise. It sounds like a band that figured out exactly what it wanted to be and then refused to apologize for any of it.
The record opens with "Mystery," the lead single, which dropped May 26, 2021 and became the first Turnstile song to chart, reaching number eight on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart and number sixteen on Mainstream Rock. That is not a small thing for a hardcore band. The song does not ease you in gently. It opens with a hazy, almost shoegaze shimmer and then the band arrives, and the contrast is the whole argument. Turnstile is not softening the edges. They are expanding the frame.
Producer Mike Elizondo, whose credits run from Dr. Dre's circle through Mastodon and Twenty One Pilots, handled production alongside co-producer Brendan Yates, the band's own vocalist. That pairing matters. Elizondo brings a pop-trained ear for space and texture. Yates keeps the record honest. The result is fifteen tracks that move through melodic hardcore, alternative rock, dream pop, and shoegaze without ever losing the physical weight that makes Turnstile worth seeing live. The band on the record is Yates on vocals, Franz Lyons on bass and vocals, Brady Ebert and Pat McCrory on guitars, and Daniel Fang on drums. All five of them are present in the sound. This is not a studio confection built around one person.
The album was recorded in isolation. The band lived in a house attached to the studio, made one grocery run a week, and focused entirely on the songs. That context is audible. GLOW ON has the density of a record made by people with nowhere else to be. "Blackout," the third single, released July 28, 2021, charted on both the Mainstream Rock and Hot Hard Rock Songs charts and became a live staple almost immediately. It is two minutes and fifty-three seconds of the band at full compression, and it lands every time.
The guest appearances are worth understanding precisely. Blood Orange, the project of British singer and producer Dev Hynes, appears on three tracks. "Alien Love Call," the second single, released July 14, 2021, is the most prominent collaboration, a hazy, slow-burning piece that sits at track nine and functions as the album's emotional center of gravity. Hynes also appears on "Endless" at track seven, and closes the record on "Lonely Dezires" at track fifteen. His contributions are not decorative. They pull the album toward something genuinely strange, and the strangeness holds.
The tracklist itself is worth reading as a document. "Mystery" opens. "Blackout" follows at track two. "Don't Play" and "Underwater Boi" push through the middle of the first half. "Holiday," at track five, became one of the most-covered songs on the record and was later released as a single in 2022. "Humanoid / Shake It Up" at track six is the kind of structural move that would get a lesser band accused of self-indulgence. Here it works because the band earns it. "Fly Again," the fourth single, dropped August 11, 2021, two weeks before the album. "Wild Wrld," "Dance-Off," and "New Heart Design" carry the record through its final third before the Blood Orange-assisted closing stretch.
The numbers tell part of the story. GLOW ON debuted at number thirty on the Billboard 200, the band's first appearance on that chart. It peaked at number two on the Top Hard Rock Albums chart. It holds a Metacritic score of ninety-two from thirteen reviews. It earned three Grammy nominations. Those are not the numbers of a cult record. They are the numbers of a record that crossed over without selling out, which is the harder trick.
The critical consensus was close to unanimous. NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Billboard all placed it on their year-end lists. Stereogum called it a classic. The praise was not just for the ambition. It was for the execution. Fifteen tracks in thirty-four minutes, and none of them feel like filler. The record moves.
There is a biographical fact that sharpens everything in retrospect. GLOW ON is the last album to feature founding guitarist Brady Ebert, who left the band in August 2022. Ebert's guitar work is woven through every track, and his departure closed a chapter. The band has continued and evolved, but this record is the document of a specific five-person lineup at a specific moment of creative confidence. That is what makes it worth returning to.
Turnstile formed in Baltimore in 2010 and spent the better part of a decade building a reputation in hardcore before anyone outside the scene paid attention. Their 2018 album Time and Space, produced by Will Yip, was the first signal that something larger was possible. GLOW ON confirmed it. The EP Turnstile Love Connection, released June 27, 2021, previewed four songs from the album and set the context. By the time the full record arrived in August, the audience was ready.
What GLOW ON did was demonstrate that hardcore's energy and hardcore's emotional directness could survive contact with almost any other genre. The record does not dilute the source material. It pressurizes it. "Mystery" sounds like a hardcore song that has been left in sunlight too long, and that is a compliment. "Blackout" sounds like a hardcore song that has been compressed into a diamond. The range between those two poles is where the album lives, and it is a wider range than most bands in any genre manage in a career.
The record was made in a barn in Tennessee by five people who had nowhere to go and nothing to prove except the music. That is the condition under which good records get made. GLOW ON is the proof.
