here’s prolific – and then there’s Twisted Teens. When speaks to Caspian Hollywell, one half of the New Orleans garage-punk outfit led by the frontman and Ramon Joseph “RJ” Santos, they’re on the verge of releasing their third album of 2026. ‘The Holy Cross Tigers’, their first for renowned indie Sub Pop, arrives just shy of four months after July’s ‘Florida Water Blues’, which in turn arrived five months after February’s breakout ‘Blame The Clown’. Ordinarily, this kind of release schedule would suggest a serious quality-control problem. Instead, Twisted Teens have somehow made three of the year’s finest rock records, each a gloriously incongruous collision of garage punk and soulful twang that sounds both decades old and extremely of-the-moment.
They’ve far from exhausted their creativity, either. Speaking to from the house where he records, Hollywell shares that the band are already turning in yet another full-length next week, with two more nearly finished. “I’ve thrown songs in the garbage that other bands could make a career off of,” he boasts, without a trace of sarcasm. Most sane bands would pause, even if just to let the audience catch its breath. Twisted Teens are not that band.
It doesn’t take long to understand why. We’re not even a minute into the interview, and Hollywell is already off the couch, phone in hand, zipping from room to room. And it’s not just physical restlessness. His mind runs equally hot and fast, with seemingly zero filter between what enters his brain and what comes out of his mouth. He can be difficult to pin down, veering from one extraordinary anecdote to another. By the time he lights a spliff off the stove, Hollywell has already shared that his great-grandfather was a prominent socialist in England who declined a title from the Queen, that before starting Twisted Teens he spent years living in a “squat” outside Santa Cruz with no electricity, and that there’s a photo of him hanging somewhere in the Banjo Museum of Oklahoma. ( has been unable to independently verify any of these claims, except that a Banjo Museum does indeed exist in Oklahoma.)
Hollywell approaches making music with the same madcap sense of adventure that, by his account, led him to spend more than a decade living off the grid, hopping trains and playing “anarchist folk music” at DIY venues across the country. Demo a song before recording it for commercial release? A total waste of time. “For 80 per cent of the recorded [Twisted Teens] songs, you are hearing the first takes,” he says. “You ever heard of demo-itis? It’s when you get addicted to the sound of the original demo. They say it happens because you’re used to it and that’s psychologically true. But there’s another thing that’s true that people don’t realise: the reason you think your demos are better is because they are.” To illustrate his point, Hollywell recounts a story of Michael Jackson recording 99 mixes of ‘Thriller’ before settling on the first. The actual story involves 91 mixes of ‘Billie Jean’, with the second ultimately making the cut. But his general point stands.
And then there’s the even larger point, one Hollywell never quite articulates yet seems essential to the band’s appeal: that when it comes to rock‘n’roll, the details matter less than the feeling. Like The Replacements before them, Twisted Teens know that sometimes getting it “wrong” – letting the accidents happen – is how you make it real. Where so many other bands seem eager to wear their hours in the studio like a badge of honour, Hollywell is far more interested in capturing a moment than perfecting a performance. Ask about one of the band’s most recent singles, ‘When We First Met’, and he simply shrugs: “I made that song in two hours, and it was done. I never thought about it again until I had to learn it so we could play it on tour.”
hat dashed-off philosophy extends across all three of the band’s 2026 albums. Twisted Teens’ songs are ragged, distorted and seemingly held together by little more than momentum and sheer force of personality. Take ‘I Bring’, a standout from ‘The Holy Cross Tigers’, where Hollywell’s gruff, wounded rasp somehow finds its way through a clatter of busted guitars and tin-can drums without losing the plot. The trick is that the grime and monumental racket are in service of melody, not the other way around.
“I’ve thrown songs in the garbage that other bands could make a career off of” – Caspian Hollywell
You can imagine these songs being every bit as effective stripped to the bone. The band’s other secret weapon is Santos – “the Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote” – whose console steel guitar lends the Teens’ music a classic, lived-in quality. There’s something wonderfully odd and exhilarating about hearing its country-inflected swoops and sighs amid Hollywell’s unruly garage rock.
The indie establishment is starting to take notice, too. Twisted Teens have already opened for The Breeders and are set to tour with Kurt Vile. In a particularly surreal development, Jeff Tweedy posted a cover of their song ‘Wild Connection’ to his personal Substack, accompanied by a note praising Hollywell’s singing.
If any of this has gone to Hollywell’s head, it’s honestly hard to tell. One suspects he has never lacked confidence in his own abilities, even if the rest of the world has taken a while to catch up. But in a rare moment of humility, he admits that the attention Twisted Teens are receiving has already exceeded his wildest expectations. “I’m talking to you. I’m talking to the . I didn’t know it was going in this direction. It’s already gone beyond what we conceived for it.”
But it would be a mistake to assume he’s satisfied now that his band has broken through. If anything, the attention seems to have made him hungrier, his mission that much clearer. “Everything that people are being served right now is just nostalgia. It’s asleep, and there’s a lot of it. And I understand why people want to go to bed. But that’s not my personality. I’m here to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” A bit of hyperbole, perhaps. But the feeling? Hollywell, as usual, gets it exactly right.
Twisted Teens’ ‘The Holy Cross Tigers’ is out now via Sub Pop.