Turnstile wraps tour in Santa Ana with an ode to the future and past

When Turnstile announced the second part of its Never Enough Tour over the summer, the lineup’s clear takeaway was genre diversity.

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The 16-date North American run kicked off on Sept. 9 and featured wildly assorted support lineups each night, varying by city and blending hardcore, punk, hip-hop, indie, and alternative acts similarly to a music festival.

Some of the acts that supported Turnstile, who are on tour promoting their Grammy-winning album “Never Enough” and its companion project “Never Enough: Versions,” included Agnostic Front, Yves Tumor, Ceremony, Pennywise, Hatebreed, Cold World, Thundercat, Angel Du$t, Die Spitz, Vince Staples and more.

On Sunday, Oct. 18, the Baltimore-based band closed out the tour with a sold-out show at The Observatory in Santa Ana, alongside local Los Angeles hardcore heavyweights Terror and darkwave electropop duo Boy Harsher. The tour’s final lineup exemplified the band’s breakthrough “Step 2 Rhythm” hardcore roots and its growing embrace of experimentation.

The show kicked off at 7 p.m. with Terror, whose unapologetic hardcore attitude was the best kind of hype band fans could ask for. Terror’s 30-minute performance set the tone for the night, with frontman Scott Vogel’s commanding stage presence getting people’s feet up in the air and two side monitors that read “Still dedicated to hardcore.”

“Who has seen Terror before?” Vogel asked the crowd, who responded with cheers. “The beautiful thing is that we’re all different: long hair, short hair, dark skin, light skin; this is our world. What this is about to me, and why I go to shows, is the energy we create together. No fights. Just good, clean fun, but we’ve got to pick up the energy.”

Vogel reminded fans that no stage diving was allowed but that their feet weren’t glued to the ground. He said security were their friends, but he wanted to see them work, so he asked fans to start slam dancing and reverse stage diving (essentially crowd surfing). The crowd eagerly obliged.

The band also brought out some special guests to join them on the mic, including Crystal Pak, the Orange County and Los Angeles-based vocalist for Initiate, for a performance of “Stick Tight.” The song, which celebrates sticking tight with your friends in the face of adversity, perfectly captured the spirit of community-centered hardcore.

Featuring Terror on this show served as an homage to the Southern California-based hardcore scene central to the culture. Terror has delivered brutal, explosive hardcore since 2002 and has earned its place as an institutional pillar revered by fans in its crowds and by the acts it shares the stage with, including Turnstile.

About 15 minutes after Terror ended their set, Boy Harsher took the stage, and the shift from brutal hardcore to synth-pop dance felt like a change of pace and energy, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The electronic duo, consisting of vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller, delivered a set that still had people moving, just in a different way.

“I love Turnstile, and we are so happy to be here, thank you,” Matthews told the crowd. “But I ask that you get a little freaky and dance a little bit because this is the time.”

Boy Harsher performed music from their latest release, “Get Mean,” a departure from their signature darkwave sound that’s regularly pounding through speakers at goth clubs. The new album may not focus solely on their debut sound, but it still shows how capable they are of creating dance bops like “Hard Beat,” “Break Me,” and “Ronny” that had people grooving like they would on a club dance floor.

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Their approach in “Get Mean” has more of an ’80s/new-wave vibe that’s paired with electric guitars, pedal steel, cellphone voice-memo textures and crisper hooks, and feels refreshing yet fitting for the group. It also fits the lineup on Tunstile’s last show and their willingness to incorporate music from outside their genre, as they did for “Never Enough: Versions.”

The remix album took the experimentation of new wave, synth-pop and shoegaze in “Never Enough” further, featuring artists of all stripes, including Elton John, Porches, Slayyyter, Hayley Williams, Blood Orange, Alex G, Four Tet, Dan Deacon, Faye Webster, Dying Fetus, Angel Du$t, Chanel Beads, Floating Points, Brandon Woody, Panda Bear, A.G. Cook, Rod Lee, Kettama, Shabaka, Oklou, Nourished by Time, Mustafa and Julien Baker.

Turnstile hopped on stage at 9 p.m., and as the stage went dark, the speakers played ambient sounds, including bird chirps, and fans knew exactly what was coming.

The band broke out into their hit “Birds,” a burst of hardcore energy that ignited the crowd to pogo up and down and start moshing. They followed up with a mix of songs from their previous albums, “Time & Space” and “Glow On,” including “Real Thing” and “Endless,” before transitioning back to “Never Enough” with “I Care” and “Dull.”

No supporting acts featured on “Never Enough: Versions” were at this final show, so fans didn’t expect any of them to join the band as special guests on stage, but the show still had a surprise tribute.

The group performed a cover of “Burning Fight,” a song by the Orange County-based hardcore band Inside Out, fronted by Zack de la Rocha before he joined Rage Against the Machine. The throwback track aired on BBC Radio 1 in May earlier this year, but hadn’t debuted at any of the band’s other shows, serving as a special tribute to the local Orange County hardcore scene.

Most of the 22-song set mirrored the first leg of the Never Enough Tour, with a mix of their catalog, including throwbacks “Keep it Moving” and “Canned Heat” from “Step 2 Rhythm.” The stage design featured the rainbow artwork and banner from the new album, which fans could also use as a backdrop for photos at the festival grounds.

The show also incorporated short videos of fans talking about hardcore music and their experiences after seeing Turnstile perform. The first videos showed fans walking into the Santa Ana venue and speaking about similar topics.

The band’s cameraman in the pit areas also returned to transmit footage of fans in the crowd to the stage monitors. He was arguably his own star, constantly getting lifted to crowd surf when he asked, and many people jumped in front of him to get on camera.

The group wrapped up the night and tour with “T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection),” an anthem that champions community with the lyrics: “I want to thank you for letting me see myself/I want to thank you for letting me be myself,” chanted by the crowd.

As fans exited the venue, drenched in sweat and smiling cheek to cheek, high-fiving each other and debriefing their favorite parts of the set, it was clear that they may never get enough of Turnstile.

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