In a few weeks, Turnstile will play a free public outdoor show on the National Lawn in Washington, DC. The performance goes down at 3 p.m. on Oct. 24. While there's no admission fee, the event will still be a benefit, with Human Concern International, the charitable organization hosting the gig, raising funds for humanitarian efforts in Palestine, Sudan, and Lebanon.
Turnstile teased the announcement with a cryptic social media post yesterday. Turnstile have done things a bit like this before. When their last two albums came out, they played free no-barrier afternoon shows at parks in their Baltimore hometown and used the occasions to raise funds for unhoused people.
They played the Clifton Park bandshell when Glow On came out in 2021, and the celebrated the release of Never Enough at Wyman Park Dell last year. Something like 10,000 people came out to the Wyman Park show. Videos from both of those gigs were absolutely fucking insane, and I was kicking myself hard for missing both of them.
A National Mall show promises to be even bigger, and I have to wonder how they even got the permits necessary to make something like this possible. They've probably run out of Baltimore parks big enough to accommodate the numbers of people that would show up to see this band. Also, though Turnstile are a Baltimore band who proudly rep the city, at least one member, frontman Brendan Yates, is originally from the Maryland suburbs of DC.
So this is still a hometown show. (Turnstile shows in Columbus or Leeds could also be considered hometown shows.) The city of Washington, DC also has a history with this kind of thing. Fugazi used to play free outdoor daytime shows in DC all the time, including a pair of benefit shows at the the Sylvan Theater on the National Mall in 1993 and 1995. Those events were vast, with thousands of people coming out.
It's hard to even conceive of how big this one will be. I'll tell you something else: I'm not missing this one. This announcement obviously comes during an extremely busy time of Turnstile's career.
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