As of Sunday night, Turnstile just became the rare hardcore band to walk out of the Grammys with actual hardware—the Baltimore group won two awards at the Premiere Ceremony, taking home Best Rock Album for Never Enough and Best Metal Performance for “Birds,” after also landing nominations for Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Alternative Music Performance. But in a new statement on Instagram, they frame that milestone less as a personal victory than as an uncomfortable vantage point from which to look at what they call “a time of heightened state violence,” where people are being pushed out of their homes “here in America, in Palestine, in Sudan, in Iran, everywhere, as if they don’t belong to them. As if we don’t belong to each other.”
The post, which runs under footage of Brendan Yates’ Best Rock Album acceptance speech, doubles down on Turnstile’s long‑running “we, not I” ethos. “On Sunday our band won 2 Grammys for Best Rock Album & Best Metal Performance. We never thought we’d be in these rooms, but we are very grateful to be here,” it begins, before insisting that the band “has never been about the individual, but rather about a collective searching for a common thread in a world where those threads are being hidden from us.” From there, they push back against the idea that anyone—genre, industry, or government—gets to decide who belongs: “The world likes to tell us who we are and what we’re not, but the truth is we belong to nothing and we belong to everyone. Music is a vehicle for voices that are buried, that are searching, that are alien. Turnstile has always existed as an alien thing.”
That language arrives after a mini‑backlash from corners of the hardcore world, where fans and at least one TikTok commentator accused the band of wasting “the biggest musical platform in the world” by not calling out state violence from the stage. It also follows the band briefly posting an “Abolish ICE” image on their Stories—a gesture that drew its own response from former guitarist Brady Ebert, who resurfaced to accuse them of “pandering” with their political posts. The statement doesn’t reference any of that directly. Instead, it closes with a long list of thanks—to “family, friends, partners, peers,” to anyone who has “ever come to a show and swung in the dark with us,” to the team that “fight for us to be in the room,” and to Baltimore “for giving us a stage”—placing their newly acquired Grammys back in the context they keep pointing to: a landscape of displacement, policing, and war that doesn’t stop when the cameras do.
