Pack of Jokers: The Wild Charm of Twisted Teens
When was the last time a band had a vice-grip on your attention? Where you went from casual to diehard fan in a dizzyingly short amount of time?
Cards on the table – that’s where I’m at currently with the rapidly rising New Orleans duo Twisted Teens, which consist of steel-eyed steel guitarist “Razor” Ramone Santos and frontman and guitarist Caspian Hollywell.
They’ve absolutely dominated my listening in 2026. It’s been an excellent year for new music, and there’s so much I still need to check out, but I cannot stop pressing play on this wild band from Louisiana – and I’m not the only one.
While the band’s been active since 2024, 2026 has felt like a true turning point for Twisted Teens, beginning with the release of their second album, Blame the Clown, in February to rave reviews.
A few weeks ago, they surprise released another collection of new tunes, the incredibly named Florida Water Blues. In a recent Paste interview, they casually mentioned plans to drop yet another new album in the Fall, Holy Cross Tigers.
By DIY standards, they’re finding a real audience and actively fanning the hype flames – which is extra cool when you consider who these guys are and what kind of music they make: former squatters and freight train hitchhikers who play grimy country/punk songs about circumcision, onion-headed undead knights, and strippers.
Which begs the question: why is 2026 the year Twisted Teens might truly break through?
My take is, in a time where AI feels more poised than ever to take over reality and the world is spinning out of control, Twisted Teens feel defiantly true and original.
They aren’t chasing trends, hacking algorithms, or strategizing some carefully curated image. They’re actively rejecting artifice and polish to put out music that sounds gloriously grimy and human.
So far, they’ve captured much of that spirit by recording a majority of their tunes from Hollywell’s home in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans during bursts of total creative freedom.
It’s not an elaborate setup either. According to their chat with writer James Broscheid in the Big Takeover, there are no pedals, no effects, and little planning – they let inspiration strike, record the results, and figure out how to play the songs on the road later. As a result, their records sound like they were dragged along the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain and left to melt in the Southern sun.
And that’s the Twisted Teens charm: extremely gifted musicians who let fun and fuckery take the wheel to crash into raw creative gold.
Speaking of raw, Hollywell’s got a leathery howl that sounds just as natural over power chords as it does old time country tunes. And Twisted Teens aren’t his first musical rodeo – he spent almost two decades as a banjo player and singer in the anarchist folk punk band Blackbird Raum, loosely based in Santa Cruz in the early 2010s.
That experience is evident in his knack for writing insatiable earworms while switching between songwriting styles. The recordings might be (intentionally) rough, but Hollywell’s chops are serious.
Ramone, on the other hand, is the band’s true no-so-secret weapon. It's a testament to the duo’s chemistry that, even in some of their most straight up punk songs, the bends and whines of his steel guitar never sound out of place.
Sometimes, he’s guiding the songs as the lead, other times he’s up in the corners of the composition, bending and warping it in all the right ways. Regardless, his contributions never fade into the background or feel forced.
Most bands are lucky to have one really good album – Twisted Teens, so far, have three. Despite the two years between the self-titled debut and their two 2026 albums, I can’t help but hear their output so far as a seamless trilogy.
That’s because, despite their freewheeling creative process, there’s a definitive sonic throughline between all three albums: skipping drum machines, ghostly midi gospel intermissions, and winding tracklists of cheeky punk tunes, country twangers, and feral hybrids of the two.
That makes it easy to jump in anywhere: pick your preferred color between orange, green, or blue and press play. If you like what you hear, you’ll likely love the other two.
For my money, the just released Florida Water Blues (aka the blue album) is my favorite – mostly because it’s loaded with punk rippers (“Business,” “Concealed Weepin,’” “Guided Thunder,” and “Top of the World Highway No. 2”) along with some of their richest songwriting so far (the Cure-like post punk of “Riding,” the thoughtful country of “Florida Water Blues”).
Blame the Clown (the green album) is much more unpredictable. Hollywell has referred to it loosely as their power pop album, and while I don’t personally hear nods to Cheap Trick, I can concede that it's got some of their stickiest choruses. “Wild Connection” might be their best song, and is a prime example of the way Hollywell’s rough voice can be pushed into maximum soulfulness and emotional resonance.
And then there’s the debut – I said above that Florida Water Blues is my favorite, but Twisted Teens has some of their most well-written songs. The A-side alone is bulletproof: “Mariontte” and “Tic Tac Toe” show just how effortlessly this band can pull off no bullshit country. For Parquet Courts fans who miss the salad days of Light Up Gold, crank up the volume on “When the Wire Get Cut” – a highlight that also includes some of Santos’ most unhinged steel guitar.
Twisted Teens - Twisted Teens
With another album in the chamber and a tour that will snake them around the U.S. opening for The Breeders and then Kurt Vile this fall, the Twisted Teens’ hot streak isn’t diminishing anytime soon.
They aren’t born from a prompt or nostalgia. They remind me of what’s possible when you tune out the world and are brave enough to make your own noise on your own terms.
By Reed Strength
Also, check out our earlier write-up about Twisted Teens’ EU-EP.
