Turnstile’s Message On Unity and Creativity

On Sunday night, Turnstile walked away with two Grammys—one for 'Never Enough' in the Best Rock Album category, and another for Best Metal Performance for their song “Birds.” The latter raised some eyebrows. Plenty of fans and media voices felt the metal award didn’t quite align with what Turnstile actually is—an act that’s notoriously hard to categorize. “Birds” is a fantastic track, but it's closer to punk than anything resembling traditional metal.

Yes, Turnstile is fundamentally a rock band, but their range is wide: they can lean into polished pop textures or explode into high‑octane punk and hard rock. To many, pairing them with the “metal performance” label felt like the Recording Academy forcing a square peg into a round hole. A lot of fans believed Ghost or Sleep Token were the more fitting choices.

Turnstile can brush up against metallic edges, but the heavy metal quotient little to none. If anything, they’re one of the few modern rock bands who seem capable of expanding into almost any genre they choose. That openness was reflected in their public statement about the wins—a message that touched on their friendship, how the world interprets them, a bit of politics, and a series of thank‑you's. They also addressed the way people try to define them:

“This 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.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.”

Artists have long felt compelled to correct mislabeling of their sound, and it makes sense. No one understands the intent, influences, and evolution of the music better than the people who create it. Misclassification bothers artists in two ways: first, it suggests their catalog hasn’t been fully understood; second, it risks boxing them into a genre that fans and industry gatekeepers expect them to stick with, which can feel creatively suffocating.

Navigating that tension—staying true to the sound that first resonated with fans while still evolving—has always been one of the trickiest balancing acts in music. Turnstile may have sidestepped the problem entirely by embracing so many stylistic avenues from the start. Their identity is built on movement, not stasis, which gives them plenty of room to maneuver without alienating their base. Judging from their statement, they intend to keep steering their own ship, playing the game on their own terms.