Review by: Case Harrison
I don’t know why but every Twisted Teens song makes me wanna run crashing into walls, jumping on cars, and smashing everything in the way. The first song that made me wanna crash into a wall was “Is It Real?” off of their first 2026 album Blame The Clown. Maybe it’s the fast paced drums, the twangy steel guitar, the strained vocals the singer yells out, or all of them combining to make it that explosive but everything in this song is designed to deliver joyous catastrophic rhythm. And that sound doesn’t stop in their second 2026 album, Florida Water Blues.
For every song that they play, Caspian Hollywell (Seabird Hollywell) and RJ Santos (Razor “The Razor” Ramone) managed to make their alt-country sound extremely fun and put the genre of cowpunk to a newer lens. Cowpunk is a music genre similar to rockabilly if it incorporated more country, blues and folky elements to it. Good examples for reference would be the Gun Club or Violent Femmes. A good description of rockabilly as a musical ethos would be what Christian Slater inhabited in True Romance: being mean, surly, living fast, and dying young, and leaving a good looking corpse. With cowpunk, it would be to replace the edginess of Christian Slater and replace it with more of the rambunctious hooligan seen in the south, like Nicolas Cage’s Wild At Heart. “Sailor” Ripley is a good persona of cowpunk as he displays a cowboy vigilante trying to stay away from the overly protective grasp of the world a.k.a Lula’s mother and the predatory grasp of the world’s evilest men a.k.a Bobby Peru. One of the lines Sailor says is “I’m a robber and a manslaughterer and I haven’t had any parental guidance” but still has a fascination with the Wicked Witch of the East from the Wizard of Oz. He is an oddball criminal punk in a world created by David Lynch which describes the structure of the Twisted Teens’ system, especially with Seabird’s presence. Seabird Hollywell still plays a bad motherf***er, but a severely ill and poisoned one.
And that sound and charisma is laid bare in Florida Water Blues, which shows their confidence in their captured rhythm and in their stylization of the covers. The last album was green, this is blue (they also recently announced their third album of the year, The Holy Cross Tigers with a beautiful burgundy cover). The only change being the colors and maintaining the diy punk art stylization you see with lo-fi bands like Sharp Pins or Heather The Jerk nowadays.
In a Paste magazine article from Matt Mitchell, he interviewed the bandmates who claimed that the green album is where they are in a “manic state,” while the blue album is in “four month depressive state” (With the burgundy album being “right after you leave the cycle of shit”, whatever that will sound like). With that in mind, there’s still a rapidity inside of that depression. In “Why Did You Miss It,” he’s not calling out that the listeners miss the sound from their last project but more questioning why they are yearning for more of their sound, or the second interpretation could be why are the listeners missing this music and begging for more? The band is highlighting its bloated importance as if they created a new kind of rhythm and questioning if they deserve being missed and yearned. The song starts off with a deeply sinister laugh, starting off with a devilish note and then fast-paced garage strumming with big raspy vocals from Seabird. Then, the second song “Hand Me a Cigarette” slows things down into more sweeter guitar strumming before the loud drum machine kicks off again into a thumping drumbeat. The lyrics are very gripping as the singer is struggling with the state of the world, he’s choosing to conform to life’s destructive values that people are handing out, like a cigarette. He’s “going home someday / might as well be their way.”
Next is another vibe change from “Swamp” as some reverse strings start off the beat with telling where the twisted teens were born: New Orleans, or “a crazy swamp in the crotch of America.” Here, Razor Ramone plays a mean steel guitar melody going with the fast paced drums and Seabird’s absurd origin story. It goes back to the themes of strange comfort with the lines “I know I’m decomposin’ / I’m decomposin’ how I want.” The song shows if well-fixed he is living in harsh environments and bitter drugs. He’s used to this mayhem expected in the heartland of America. The title track adds more country into the mix as there is a killer guitar solo. Seabird Hollywell carries throughout the whole album with his scratchy crooning voice. As much as he replicates Tom Waits with his vocal chops, his preachiness in his lyrics and rhythm actually reminds me of Sean Bonnette from AJJ in how they used their unorthodox singing and energy to convey the shocking world they live in. The difference is that Seabird has more of a stream of consciousness way of speaking but they both talk like a preacher from the end times shouting how did we get here and striving through it with thunderous guitar playing.
“Guided Thunder” proves their fury as it is the most explosive and noisiest song of the record, as it feels like you’re participating in tornado jumping with the bandmates, as the strings are piercing through the audio, the drums are going hardcore and the vocals are screaming. There’s a striking shred with the steel guitar that gives it a triumphant orchestral tune. Everything just collides beautifully but then it ends with a creepy bell lullaby but it wraps it to being oddly soothing as everything slows down. It’s an incredible thrill ride of a song. The title track is where things get a little bit more country. For the summer, I went to La Quinta, which is a hot-as-hell desert my parents wanted to visit to see the Joshua Tree National Park. Nearby there is a place called Pioneertown, a semi-isolated place with a bunch of trailers and haystacks strewn over the place. It’s an incredibly dusty and worn down western environment, with the heat of over 100 degrees. There’s old ranches, tall dusty mountains, and a restaurant called Pappy & Harriet’s where a bunch of musicians including Paul McCartney visited. I imagine this is where they are playing this song, somewhere in its own version in Florida. It’s a soulful melancholic jam with a small kickass guitar solo in the middle that makes it a hootenanny.
The album goes back to a punk tune with “Top Of The World Hwy No.2” which has a guitar slide that sounds like a jet airplane flying over and a fantastic dramatic sting. It is clear that Twisted Teens has nailed down a simple on-core melody with their albums with a theme of fast-paced drums, some gnarly riffs create the base of where the song is going, and a visible steel guitar that guides the entire track, all with Seabird jumpin on it with full fury and blast. “Concealed Weepin” however is a little bit slow on that front. The steel guitar is the shining star but everything else feels like doing half of their power to make this a sad banger. I still like the lyrics:
“From black to gray, to gray to white
There’s a night in the day and a day in the night
Opposites create one another
And it makes you feel you’d rather not bother.”
A great bit of apathetic and strange melancholy leads to “Riding” which bumps the melancholic to a more quicker pace. “Riding” makes me feel like I’m doing a cuphead level. It’s a spooky ghoulish beat that feels like it was from a rubber hose cartoon where Betty Boop has died. The synths do an excellent work on maintaining a creepy atmosphere, especially with the ending where vocaloids do a harmonious curse on the listener, as they produce a four-part barbershop vocal orchestration. This leads to another goosebumps feature on “Business” where a sample of a church folk song plays chopped up and distorted, with loud gunshot drums breaking the rhythm, leading to a semi-cover of the song with fun guitar noodling and a pumped-up rock’n’roll tempo.
“Javelina” goes a bit of Tom Petty folk with the vocals and everything strumming nicely along as it really shows the sad beauty of Caldwell’s vocals and how it can elevate a simple melody, especially about one being chased down and killed like a little javelina, a pig-like ungulate creature subsisting on tubers. But then it kicks up the jam with a loud guitar anthem riff that starts off “Weather the Season,” probably my favorite song on the album. It is one of the slowest tempo songs they’ve done and also one of the daziest as it feels like a lounge rock ballad to drunkenly sing and swing around at 4 in the morning. Even the solo feels disjointed and jangly, scantily throwing itself out into the whirlwind of instrumentation in force. It all coincides with the themes of lost in a world of information and illusion that Seabird Hollywell depicts is ruining him. It is an incredible emotional banger.
Next up is “Dancer,” a catchy tune where Seabird is directing the movements and Razor is producing a soulful string alongside big marching drums in the background. It’s a sweet fun song after the ballad that produces a little angst with literal bleeps in the track when Seabird said something controversial and a little spoken word where he says: “no it’s a curse you’re right”, with a lot of feeling of shame and guilt after saying that. It’s a great little jam before the final song “Sun Go Down” where it’s a slow emotional guitar ballad that evokes Bob Dylan in a dumpster. Seabird really swoons in a swan song for the final song as he talks about how impending the doom coming for him is as he knows where the sun falls in his perspective. He does it by comparing it to his experience of a group of teenagers throwing a refrigerator over a bridge (We’ve all been there, right?), noting the strange anarchy he sees in his own daily life. Finally, it ends with an eerie ambient noise consisting of a compulsing siren, a dying ringtone and a disjointed guitar to represent the hidden gloominess of the album. It’s in this song that evokes the nature of the Twisted Teens where they are aligned to life’s own absurd destructive values for the sake of survival and apathy. It goes back to the themes of cowpunk where you’re an enemy of authority but are still bound to the destructive rules of life’s wishes.
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