In early 2024, the musicians Caspian Hollywell and R.J. Santos were living next door to each other in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans when Hollywell proposed they start a garage punk band, with Santos on console steel guitar. Within a month, the good friends had recorded their first album — a twangy, bluesy, lo-fi affair — in Hollywell’s living room studio under the name Twisted Teens. The duo realized early on that something special was happening.
“We were like, damn, there’s lightning in the bottle here,” Hollywell, the band’s 44-year-old raw-voiced singer and multi-instrumentalist, recalled during an interview last month at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. “It was just this weird thing where it sounded like the dirtiest punk in the world would listen to it, but it also sounded like it could be on the radio. It was a eureka moment for both of us.”
Hollywell grew up in the Bay Area and co-founded the Santa Cruz, Calif., anarchist folk-punk band Blackbird Raum in the early 2000s. Santos, who is Filipino-Canadian, is a fine artist and sign painter. The bandmates, who first met in New Orleans in the late 2010s, both have roots in the traveling subculture: train-hopping, squatting, dumpster-diving, busking. At one point, Hollywell said, he lived on a couch in the middle of a field: “You took a shower whenever it rained, whether you needed it or not.”
The pair gave themselves two years to “work crazy hard” to make Twisted Teens a success, Hollywell said. They hit their deadline. “It was basically exactly two years later when we got a Pitchfork Best New Album” for the band’s second record, “Blame the Clown,” he continued. “And ever since then, our lives have changed.”
Twisted Teens — the name is a play on the alcoholic beverage brand Twisted Tea — signed with the venerable Seattle label Sub Pop shortly thereafter, then released its already recorded second album of 2026, “Florida Water Blues,” on the small Going Underground label in July. The band’s Sub Pop debut (and third release this year), “The Holy Cross Tigers,” comes out Friday.
Amid the onslaught of music, Twisted Teens has been embraced by the indie rock establishment. The group — co-managed by Allison Crutchfield, a prominent D.I.Y. musician in her own right — opened shows for the Breeders over the summer and will be supporting Kurt Vile and the Violators on tour. (For its spirited live shows, Twisted Teens expands to a five-piece, including the guitarist Mel Billiard, who contributed heavily to the latest album.) Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer and guitarist of Wilco, recently shared his cover of the band’s “Wild Connection” on his Substack.
In an interview, Tweedy praised Hollywell for not engaging in the “disaffected kind of pretending that you don’t want to be doing what you’re doing” that he’s witnessed in many younger musicians. “He’s singing at a proper dynamic level for a rock band, he’s not whispering over loud guitars,” Tweedy said, adding, “I don’t hear it as much, this sort of unabashed singing out, singing to the rafters. There’s an energy to it that comes through the recordings that I’m really intrigued by.”
Both Hollywell and Santos ascribed Twisted Teens’ high-energy music to their experiences as buskers. “You have to play loud while you’re busking, so people down the street can hear you,” Santos said. “And I think that transforms into the Twisted Teens. Like the way I play the steel guitar — it’s a really delicate instrument, but I really dig into it at times.”
“I don’t sing like any of these other indie rock musicians because I’ve had to scream my head off my whole life,” Hollywell said.
The singer, who wore a black leather vest over a T-shirt for the Olympia, Wash., punk band Fugitive Bubble, figured that the love Twisted Teens was getting from fellow performers stemmed in part from the band’s authenticity.
“We’re folkies,” Hollywell said. “We’re writing real songs. We’re not tricking you. We’ll write a song in the way that those people wrote songs.” He mentioned Woody Guthrie by way of example, adding, “I think a lot of the new rock music has lost its connection to tradition.”
Hollywell added that the quantity and quality of Twisted Teens’ music also helped. “We’re not coming out the gate with one good song,” he said. “We’re coming out the gate with like 50 good songs. Like, any song off any of our albums could be a single. That’s our goal. Everything’s a banger — no stale fish, no half-ass. I made some totally solid B-plus songs in the past two years, and you will never hear them.”
Shannon Shaw, frontwoman of the oldies-inspired garage rockers Shannon and the Clams and a friend of Hollywell’s, praised his creative instincts. “Caspian was born for this,” Shaw said in an email, adding, “He is a creation machine, he’s a lightning rod, he is prolific. He is quintessential punk to me in the way that he works from the heart always.”
Whereas Hollywell is voluble and tends to be the center of attention, Santos, 34, is a self-described “hermit” who likes spending time at home practicing music or painting. (He paints the old-timey Twisted Teens hand saws the band sells at shows.) Together, Shaw said, “they make the most lovely yin and yang.”
Hollywell described his bond with his bandmate in literary terms: “Larry McMurtry said that the classic male friendship archetype in literature is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.” He added, “It’s the crazy guy and the straight man dynamic. It’s just gold.”
Twisted Teens recorded the plaintive “The Holy Cross Tigers” in the wake of Hollywell’s split with a girlfriend. Although it’s been described as a breakup record — Santos, upon a first listen to the songs Hollywell was working on, compared it to Bob Dylan’s pained classic “Blood on the Tracks” — the singer pushed back on that characterization somewhat.
“Our albums are more like what was happening that week,” Hollywell said, pointing to the record’s country-tinged track “Lock and Key,” which he said was inspired by a drug-running neighbor who snitched on the cartel he was working for. Santos called the new LP, which was completed before the band signed with Sub Pop, “really old news for us.”
“It’s funny, because someone was coming at me online the other day, being like, ‘Why you guys dropping three records this year? Just trying to cash in,’” Hollywell said. “I was like, ‘Bro, I made these three albums when nobody besides some German punks and our homies knew who our band was.’”
Twisted Teens recently recorded yet another record, which will come out next summer; in keeping with the band’s other LPs, the cover will feature a solid-color background (this one will be yellow).
Hollywell cited Jonathan Richman, Violent Femmes and the Velvet Underground as influences on the 2027 album. “All I can think about is that right now,” he said. “I’m proud of ‘The Holy Cross Tigers,’ but the yellow record is going to go crazy.”
At the same time, the band is just coming to terms with success in the present. “I think it happened so quickly that I didn’t really have time to think about things,” Santos said. “Like opening up for the Breeders — it was just another day for me because it was all happening so fast.”
“We got so many crazy accolades and things in a period of six months,” Hollywell said. “At this point, it’s just like, you can’t go out in a rainstorm and get focused on a raindrop. You just got to get your umbrella out, you know. We’re happy that we did our thing, but me and R.J. don’t rest. We’re going to just think of another goal and grind our way through.”
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