Turnover: From Pop-punk To Sunny Synths

Austin Getz founded Turnover just out of high school. Ten years and four albums later, they’re still together, this band having defined his life. 

“I’ve definitely had relationships end, friendships fade away, and a tonne of new ones begin, all because of the band,” he says, contemplatively. “In [every facet] of my life, every decision that I’ve made, the first thing I’ve thought about is the band... It’s kind of like someone who’s a workaholic, where their job is the centre of their life, and any experience they have they’re relating it back to that, making it fit around this thing that is so central to [their] life.

"There have been times when I’ve hated it, and felt trapped, because I’ve spent so much time giving to it, and sacrificing for it. Times of forgetting why I love it. But, then, things have changed, and I’ve gotten back to remembering why I appreciate it, why I’m so thankful for it [and how] Turnover [has] caused me to grow so much by its very nature.”

The germinating seed for all of this was a fortuitous, formative, pop-punk encounter. “In first grade, I heard All The Small Things by blink-182 on the radio on the way to school, and I became obsessed with it,” Getz recounts. In eighth grade, he begged for a Les Paul, and was shocked when his parents got it for him (“I told everybody on my AIM friends list”). The guitar initially gathered dust, but when his family relocated from New Orleans to Virginia Beach, that changed. “I had no friends, so I started playing guitar every day,” Getz says.

Turnover were formed with due DIY punk spirit, and ambitions beyond the musical. “[We wanted] to use our music as a vessel to create, be able to see the world, make new friends, have cool experiences, [and] get out of the suburban life we were used to.”

The core of Turnover - Getz, his brother Casey on drums and bassist Danny Dempsey - has been there from the start, their lives changing alongside the band; and the band, in turn, changing. “I feel like it’s an entirely different animal at this point [compared to the beginning], and not the same in any way,” Getz offers. “That underlying arc to our relationship, how it’s grown and how it’s changed, reflects the way the band has changed.”

And change they have. “We started out as a punk, pop-punk, emo-punk band,” Getz admits - a sound that seems a long way from where they’ve ended up. It was on their third album, 2017’s Good Nature, that they first transcended their punk roots; stripping away the noise and distortion for a clean, indie-pop sound. On their sunny, synthy new album, Altogether, they take this idea further, the album full of keyboards, melody, harmony.

“We wanted to use different instrumentation, different types of arrangements of the songs, different treatments of how we recorded the songs,” Getz offers. “Without any of us demanding that we do things differently, a lot of different stuff just happened... The songs have a lot more dynamic than our other records in the past; in terms of the writing, the techniques used to record, the fact we’ve kept it all stripped back, never just layered on the guitars. We were listening to a lot less rock stuff, so we never had that compulsion to make something that was this big rock record.”

Of course, by this point, change may be the band’s definitive quality. “The narrative about Turnover is starting to be that you can’t ever expect anything, because we’re always moving along, doing something different,” Getz says. “Putting out these new songs, you see a lot of love, but you definitely see some hate. But, now our fans will go in to bat for us, say, ‘Yo, if you still want to go and listen to [2015’s] Peripheral Vision, you can still do that, it still exists.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ That’s when you know we’ve got [fans] willing to grow with us.”