Baltimore hardcore outfit Turnstile has been confirmed as the Turnstile SNL musical guest for the 3 October episode, appearing alongside host Dakota Johnson, a booking that would have seemed improbable for a band of their pedigree even two or three years ago, yet feels almost inevitable now.
The group arrives at NBC‘s long-running sketch institution on the back of a genuinely exceptional run. According to The Banner, the band, comprising frontman Brendan Yates, guitarists Meg Mills and Pat McCrory, bassist Franz Lyon and drummer Daniel Fang, took home its first two Grammy Awards in February: best rock album for Never Enough and best metal performance for “Birds”. That kind of mainstream institutional recognition doesn’t usually find hardcore acts, and it signals something real about where Turnstile have positioned themselves, straddling the underground and the overground without ever quite abandoning either.
Turnstile SNL Musical Guest Appearance and the Never Enough Campaign
Their 2025 album Never Enough is the text from which this whole period follows. The SNL appearance will presumably draw on that material, and the timing is pointed: The Banner reports that Never Enough: Versions, a collection of alternate takes and remixed versions, was released on 28 August. The contributors list reads like a curated playlist someone assembled across an uncommonly broad taste: Elton John, Four Tet, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Floating Points and boygenius’ Julien Baker all appear, suggesting a band whose orbit now comfortably includes figures from British electronic music, classic rock royalty and American indie-folk. Whether those collaborations deepen on stage or remain a studio curiosity, the 3 October broadcast offers the group’s highest-profile platform yet.
There is something pleasingly dissonant about a hardcore five-piece anchoring an SNL lineup, and the contrast with the season’s other musical bookings only sharpens it.
The Full Season Lineup: From KATSEYE to Gracie Abrams
The 26 September season opener, hosted by New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson, features global girl group KATSEYE, a booking that puts the show squarely in the centre of contemporary pop’s most algorithmically saturated territory. The contrast with Turnstile the following week is jarring, which is to say the show’s producers have done something right.
ROSALÍA performs on 10 October, on an episode hosted by comedian Shane Gillis. Her appearance carries its own weight of interest, not least because she is currently in talks to take the lead role in Alma Har’el’s drama Wet, per Deadline. It would represent the biggest film role to date for an artist who briefly appeared in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 film Pain and Glory and had a more substantial part in season three of HBO’s Euphoria. An SNL performance mid-negotiation on a high-profile film project is well-timed positioning, even if the two things are presumably unconnected.
The final pairing announced so far is Gracie Abrams on the 31 October Halloween episode, with host Inde Navarrette of Obsession. Abrams released Daughter from Hell in July, but has since moved into a different creative register: she is currently filming her acting debut as the lead character in writer and director Halina Reijn’s Please, which will be released by A24. The Halloween slot, always a gift in terms of performance theatrics, arrives at an odd transitional moment for her, the music campaign still fresh, the film work already under way.
Taken together, the four bookings represent the programme’s now-habitual instinct for contrast: a Grammy-winning hardcore band, a K-pop adjacent girl group, a Spanish avant-pop artist fielding Hollywood interest and a singer-songwriter moonlighting as a film lead. It is, at minimum, a more interesting spread than most seasons manage. The Turnstile date, 3 October, is the one to watch most closely, not simply as spectacle, but as a measure of just how far a hardcore band can travel without losing the thing that made them worth following in the first place.
Heart
Haha
Love
Wow
Yay
Sad
Poop
Angry
