Chasing Fridays: Turnstile live, 300SkullsAndCounting, Slow Pulp Q&A, more

By the time you're reading this I will be in the center of the universe, otherwise known as Bushwick, for a weekend of frolicking and shoegazing. I'm seeing Whirr's last show for the foreseeable future this Sunday at the Brooklyn Paramount, and will be bopping around the city in the days leading up to that. Say hi if you see me out and about. This week I reviewed Rio Da Yung OG's new album for Pitchfork, which I didn't like very much, sadly. I also wrote about a bunch of music for the latest edition of Chasing Fridays: new singles from 300SkullsAndCounting and Zachshots, a live report from the pit of Turnstile's gigundo tour, and a Q&A with indie-rock progenitors Slow Pulp. Have at it.

300SkullsAndCounting, Jenny Sparks - "The Ballad of St. Nick's Park"

300SkullsAndCounting has broken containment. Last week, the 8-bit screamo wackjob dropped a new song with UK bassline producer Jenny Sparks, previewing a collab album that the pair are about to release via XL Recordings. A video snippet of "The Ballad of St. Nick's Park" quickly caught fire on Music Twitter, where people noted the track's similarities to the famously loathed crunk-core pioneers Brokencyde – which is exactly what people said when 100 gecs' "Money Machine" first went viral on Twitter in 2019. The comparison isn't inaccurate, but really, "The Ballad of St. Nick's Park" sounds more like early Enter Shikari without the breakdowns. Regardless, it's telling that an artist who resembles either of those bands is now labelmates with Radiohead and Arca.

300SkullsAndCounting's integration into the metropolitan underground doesn't surprise me. Over the last couple years, the UK artist has played live with Bassvictim and fakemink and collaborated with Worldpeace DMT and Swords2, making him one degree of separation from some of the trendiest indie music in the world right now. My roommate has been heaping praise on 300SkullsandCounting's chiptuned bedroom screamo for the past year, but I never saw him as more than a fascinating yet fatiguing outsider-pop character until I heard "The Ballad of St. Nick's Park." I think this song genuinely rules, specifically because he and Jenny Sparks do more than just cheekily mash two genres together – one cool, the other cringe – for the sake of turning heads.

What they accomplish here is something that few, if any, other scene-core vets ever have: write a tasteful song. Brokencyde's desperately misogynistic, shriek-laden rap-core remains irredeemably terrible no matter how many layers of post-irony you heap onto it. Enter Shikari's older stuff still kind of goes, but their jury-rigging of UK bass music with bright, maximalist metalcore was dripping with a dweeby earnestness that hasn't aged well. "The Ballad of St. Nick's Park" amazes me by how minimal it is. The pattering kick, aqueous bass, and dinky keyboard melody never build into a genuine racket, so 300's throat-shredding yells and boy-voiced raps never have anything to hide behind. The juxtaposition is jarring at first, but after your second or third listen, "St. Nick's" begins to sound like pop music. Go ahead, add my skull to the pile.

Zachshots - "These Are My Friends"

The first time I heard this song I shook my head and said, "c'mon, that's not fair." Many listens later, I still feel the same way. Zachshots are the pop-punky twee duo of Zach Galsky and Annika Haakonsen, whose combined resumes include the bands Cash Only Tony's, Holidays in United States ,and Aeiou. It's genuinely insane how many good Brooklyn-based bands these folks are simultaneously playing in, and it's wild to think that Zachshots might be the best one. Or at least the one with the greatest chance of becoming legitimately huge – so long as they keep writing legitimately huge songs like "These Are My Friends."

I got into Zachshots' self-titled EP earlier this year, a three-song sampling of boy-girl acoustic twee with a rascally edge (a song titled "Williamsburg Bitch," a band titled Zachshots). The track "Von Bismark" revealed the serious songwriting chops lingering behind their not-so-serious presentation, and "These Are My Friends" confirms it wasn't a fluke. The new tune electrifies Zachshots' sound with crunchy guitars and sturdy drumming, but the interplay between Galsky and Haakonsen's voices remains their calling card. The chirp-and-response hook is one of the catchiest choruses I've heard all year. I can't wait to watch videos of kids in too-tight screamo tees lose their shit to it.

Turnstile live @ Stage AE

Turnstile were my band. They're one of a select handful of artists who fundamentally altered my perspective on music. They were the first hardcore band I ever loved. I had liked a few Terror songs, some Hatebreed, some adjace-core stuff like Stick To Your Guns and Touché Amoré, but it was Turnstile who changed my life. Who showed me that it wasn't metal, but hardcore – a genre that's as much a musical style as it is a sport, a worldview, a secret language of references and signifiers – that I was meant to love. Two weeks into 2015, when Turnstile's debut LP, Nonstop Feeling, dropped, I started listening to music in a different way. I began disowning my teenage music taste and learning a new subcultural dialect. What I liked before was never enough. Hardcore, as Turnstile's music showed me, could be.

Two months later, in March 2015, I saw Turnstile live for the first time. They played to about 200 people in a small club in Albany, and at the time, for that scene, for where hardcore was in that era, that reaction felt seismic. Eleven-and-a-half years later, this past Tuesday, I saw Turnstile for the eighth time. They played to five thousand people at one of the biggest venues in Pittsburgh. At this time, based on where hardcore is during this era, the crowd response at that show felt equally seismic, just at a much bigger scale. I had seen Turnstile play the same stage five years earlier, when they opened for emo-rap burnouts $uicideboy$. Hardly anyone in that crowd cared about Turnstile. This time, everyone in that crowd behaved as if their lives were also changed by Turnstile. They probably were.

It had been four years since I last saw Turnstile, when they played to half as many fans at the indoor stage of this venue during their 2022 headliner, and in that time my relationship with their music had changed. I loved GLOW ON wholeheartedly and still do, but the bigger the album got, the more overexposed Turnstile – and therefore hardcore – became, and the less I felt connected with their fanbase. Turnstile were no longer my band. They were the world's band – and deservedly so, because they're one of the finest active rock groups of the 21st century, bar none. But they no longer served the same function to me. I was in a different stage of my life, listening to much different hardcore, and when Turnstile released NEVER ENOUGH in 2025, I felt as though they'd already given me all they could. That I, personally, had had enough. I was content to live with the memories I made to their music in my early twenties, and watch from afar while millions of others had their turn to feel what I did.

I entered the gates of Stage AE on Tuesday expecting that Turnstile would be great, that the show would be entertaining, that the crowd would be invigorating, but that something would be missing. I anticipated that I'd be chasing a high – the buzz of stage-diving to Turnstile in a rented church in 2015, or stage-diving over a barricade at a Turnstile show in 2016 – that could never be attained at a Turnstile show in my early thirties. I did not think that a 5,000-person audience, consisting mostly of people who've never heard a Madball song before, would be able to replicate the ecstatic chaos of a proper hardcore show in a smaller, more intimate venue. And I was pleasantly, blissfully, euphorically proven wrong. I left the venue that night feeling like I used to after Turnstile shows: that I'd just seen the best concert in as long as I can remember.

It goes without saying that the band were on fire. They've been one of the tightest, most consistently exciting live bands in the world for as long as I've known their name, and I had no doubt that the songs would sound bulletproof – and that Turnstile would look cool as fuck while playing them. What I doubted was the songs' capacity to move me, both emotionally and physically. I knew they wouldn't be playing much of the older material that I'm partial to, and I wasn't sure if the tracks from their latest two records would ignite the same amount of joy in my gut and zeal in my limbs that Nonstop Feeling still does all these years later. It was during the second song of the night, "Real Thing," the hard-charging opener from 2018's Time & Space, that I realized something was happening. I hadn't heard that song in a long time, but I was overjoyed to pump my fist and holler its hook alongside my best friend. Like, really happy. A degree of delight that I don't often get from live music anymore.

Then they played "ENDLESS," a spry jaunt from GLOW ON where the hook – "yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah" – is chanted with a pseudo-patois accent that's impossibly fun to mimic alongside thousands of other bodies who can't stand still. I pushed through a few layers of fans to get closer. Then they played "I CARE," a new-wavey rock song from NEVER ENOUGH that I disparagingly compared to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" in my lukewarm review of the Grammy-winning album. Live, I was boogying. Then I was straining my voice to belt "DULL," another NEVER ENOUGH song that I couldn't have identified by its title before this show, but that I felt instinctively connected to when the pit exploded during its shit-kicking climax.

By this point, I had scooted up to the lip of the pit and was feeling its gravitational pull tugging at me like a strong wind. It was "Drop" that yanked me in. "Move, your, feet" – and I posi-jumped into the action. That was the sole Nonstop Feeling song they pulled out all night, but once I started bashing around, it didn't matter what they played, I was smitten by it all. Everything I dinged NEVER ENOUGH for being – slower, glossier, littered with new-agey synth interstitials – only made the live experience that much better. The fast and riotous songs whipped the crowd into such an overstimulated frenzy that those cool-down periods – particularly the plush techno outro in "LOOK OUT FOR ME" – were necessary recharge moments. Every extreme, from getting clocked in the face while swinging animalistically to "Keep It Moving," to getting locked in a trance during the middle-eastern sounding keyboard jam they broke into during "SOLE," was crucial to the overall experience.

However, the aspect that most wowed me was the creative production – something I normally wouldn't give a fuck about at a hardcore show. Turnstile had a pro camera crew filming not just the band onstage, but also roaming through the crowd to capture close-up footage of moshers, singers, lovers, strangers all participating in a greater whole. No matter which direction you looked, whether at the stage or into the crowd, you saw faces smiling and bodies flailing. It cultivated a level of intimacy that I've never experienced at a show of this scale, and fostered a sense of camaraderie that I've only ever felt at other Turnstile shows. It's genuinely staggering to me that they can still pull that off while operating at the level of a marquee festival-headlining rock band.

It was simultaneously the most and least like a hardcore show of any hardcore show I've ever been to. Logistically and structurally, it was a mainstream rock concert. Spiritually and emotionally, it was a 200-cap room with no barricade. I can really only think to describe it as feeling like what you imagined a hardcore show would be like before you ever attended one. Before you knew what karate-moshing was; before you learned through trial by fire how violent this culture can be; before you realized you're supposed to wear this shirt, not that shirt; before it became un-cool to publicly jock the band that opened the gates of hardcore to you. Turnstile brought me back to a time when there was only one hardcore band who mattered to me. They reminded me why they were my band then, and why they always will be.

Chasing Down

Emily Massey and Henry Stoehr
of
Slow Pulp

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

It's nice that we're finally getting a new Slow Pulp album. I wasn't a huge fan of the Chicago-via-Madison band's 2020 album, Moveys, but their 2023 LP, Yard, was one of my favorite records of that year. In a live review I wrote back in 2024, I said that Slow Pulp's music is "the perfect distillation of what indie-rock sounds like in the early 2020s; a little Alex G, a little Soccer Mommy, a little country, a little slowcore." I think that description remains more or less accurate for Melodie, though this time around, Slow Pulp's songs seem to gleam a little brighter and reach a little higher toward indie-rock's stratosphere. I'm curious to see where this album will take them.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Slow Pulp's songwriters, Emily Massey and Henry Stoehr, about Melodie's sense of ambition, working with an outside producer for the first time, their favorite fall music, the Melodie tracks they're proudest of, and much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 70-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.