Caspian Hollywell’s house in New Orleans doesn’t look like I expected. The wily frontman of Twisted Teens dances onstage like a marionette emulating the moves of a 1950s entertainer in a leather vest—a loud, motley style to match his band’s Americana-imbued garage rock. He looks like he was born on the muddy stoop of a beloved punk house. Instead, he’s spent the past decade in this picturesque cottage with salmon-colored shutters and white roof brackets carved to resemble lace. Here, nestled between oak trees and yucca plants in the Holy Cross neighborhood, Hollywell found a place to live and turned it into a creative wellspring.
Back in 2016, following the death of his longtime friend and former Bay Area musician Paul Woods, Hollywell wandered down to New Orleans to commiserate with fellow punks at a different squat-turned-communal house in Holy Cross. After a lifetime of train-hopping across the country, playing old-time fiddle music with strangers, and working odd jobs, he knew it was almost time to put down roots. While exploring the neighborhood, his dog, Betty, took off and sprinted through the open door of an empty house, sniffing around yet completely at ease. In the dirt by his feet was a crumpled For Sale sign. Hollywell approached the landlord, a 70-something weed kingpin and car repairman who ran the entire block, to buy the house with his life savings. The landlord answered the door in a bloody shirt, dick out, gun in hand, and accepted the deal.
Holy Cross and the Lower Ninth Ward that borders it are known for their quiet ambiance, grocery store deserts, and drawbridge access with unpredictable hours. They’re also synonymous with Hurricane Katrina. Awash in 10-foot-high floodwaters, this area became the disaster’s unwitting poster child, its destruction still strewn about 21 years later. Abandoned shotgun homes with collapsed roofs and heaps of deteriorated belongings sit next to sunset-painted bungalows and historic steamboat houses. Faded picket signs poke out of lawns demanding that Brad Pitt and his foundation, Make It Right, fix their homes, after the celebrity’s 2007 housing initiative resulted in uninhabitable homes and dozens of empty lots. Newer signs taped to windows hope to stop the local wharf from becoming a corporate grain terminal.
Up close, there’s no mistaking Hollywell’s house. Affixed to a glass window pane on the front door is a blue-and-yellow vintage sticker for the Holy Cross Tigers, the sports department of a local Catholic private school that was ravaged by Katrina, from which Twisted Teen’s upcoming album gets its name. When I knock, it’s not Hollywell who answers the door, but Natalie Hanne Winkler, the blonde frontwoman of jangle-pop band Paper Jam. Despite seeing them perform two months ago on Chicago’s swan boats, part of me doubts it’s her, given her band hails from Denton, Texas.
When I ask, perplexed, if she’s in Paper Jam, Winkler laughs and correctly assumes my next question: Yes, she and Hollywell met weeks ago in Los Angeles as mutual fans of each other’s music, and she’s here to record vocals for Twisted Teens’ next album—not The Holy Cross Tigers, the band’s third LP of 2026, or the unnamed electronic record Hollywell mentioned to me at their Chicago show this summer, but another album entirely. That’s shaping up to be Twisted Teens’ whole thing: the band that churns out twangy punk songs nonstop. That each record is more catchy than the last is unbelievable or enviable, depending on if you write music, too.
Bounding through the doorway comes Betty. She’s large with long black fur, grey marks around her eyes from old age, and the demeanor and double coat of a Belgian shepherd crossed with a border collie. Hollywell follows suit with a big grin and outstretched arms, a DIY king ready to show off his castle, while an unreleased Twisted Teens song with Winkler singing harmonies blasts throughout the room. “Nina! Welcome to Teens town!” he nearly shouts. “Want a tour?”
Hollywell operates his home like a punk house, where anyone is welcome to crash for as long as they need. In the front room, which doubles as a recording studio, every surface is covered in personal items: framed photos and loose polaroids, a cross-stitched monkey dressed as Peter Pan, multiple decks of playing cards, a pink parasol, neon green dice, the original tin-type photo on the cover of 2024’s Twisted Teens. It’s just an illusion of clutter, though, as everything is shelved or hung up and the floors are spotless. A cordless Dyson vacuum rests on a wall.
There’s a guest bedroom with a massive wooden bunk bed built by a competitive bass fisherman who starred in an MMA reality TV show. Next door is Hollywell’s bedroom, where natural light floods the walls covered in retro ephemera—a faux political sign for Cyndi Lauper, a diagram of the cockatiel’s embryonic development—and so many paperback books that I lose track counting.
He pushes open a screen door, and we spill into a sprawling backyard that is half junkyard and half magical imaginarium. A green trailer sits to the side of the property (where RJ “Razor” Santos, Twisted Teens’ console steel player, first lived when he moved to New Orleans), a ‘90s sewer camera truck converted into a modest home (where Mel Billiard, Twisted Teens’ secret weapon of a guitarist, currently lives), a camper van (where two of Caspian’s Gen X friends, a carpenter and a so-called witch, temporarily reside), a classic yellow school bus (as seen on the cover of their February album Blame the Clown), a standalone wooden patio (with a functioning fridge and radio), an open-air shed (stocking eight bikes, among other items), and another patchworked shack that my brain can’t compute as also residing on this property. A handful of chickens and roosters roam the property. They showed up several years ago, as if they somehow intuited its vibe.
Hollywell is a self-professed yapper, and in his backyard, he gets to yapping. One minute, he points over the fence at a tall, multi-story, yellow building to explain how Santos ended up living there for part of the year. The next, he flings open the door to the Billiard’s abode, who freezes in the middle of the room, fiddle in one hand, bow in the other, and blinks at us in response. Hollywell exits, rears around, and swings open the fence to his neighbor’s backyard and we march past the guy’s house and across the road to a massive embankment of tall grass. At the top, we overlook the levee that spills into the Mississippi River. Two great blue herons lift off from the water’s edge and coast along a breeze as the sun glints off their wings. The rapid-fire induction into Hollywell’s home, indoors and outdoors, is overwhelming in a staggering way. Of course he’s inspired to write every day when this is what surrounds him.
Back in the makeshift recording studio of Hollywell’s living room, Winkler finishes tracking an extra round of vocal harmonies and teases Hollywell for always using the “warm male vocal” UAD preset. We listen to three unreleased Twisted Teens songs from the nearly finished album. He spins in a wooden rolling chair while bopping his head and consults a paper with a handwritten tracklist. These new songs are, yet again, immediately catchy, with sugar-rush hooks made sweeter by Winkler’s stacked falsettos. The standout is “To Glow,” in which the two singers trade off beats in a pattern verging on vocal hocketing. Their chemistry is undeniable. “See, she’s the only one who can catch my raps!” says Hollywell, enthused. “This is our Jonathan Richman flow!”
Though guitars are leaning against seemingly every immovable object in the room—a new one gifted from Fender, a pristine console steel Santos plays onstage, a red Gibson SG owned by the late Paul Woods that’s heard throughout Twisted Teens’ debut album—no music genre makes Hollywell geek out more than underground rap on SoundCloud. Florida Water Blues opener “Why Did You Miss It?” lifts a lyric from “Treacherous” by Lazer Dim 700, but nobody has caught it yet, he laments. (A few years back, he got to make a beat for Lazer Dim 700 that he rapped over but never released.) Hollywell also names Atlanta rapper Glokk40Spaz as “a huge inspiration” for Twisted Teens’ own nonstop output. Both artists are frantically creating music after losing someone to a shooting: Glokk40Spaz’s little sister in a robbery gone wrong, and Twisted Teens’ dear friend August Golden at the infamous Nudieland shooting. Even his open-door policy, guest features, and behind-the-scenes production work for everyone from Hurray for the Riff Raff to underground Atlanta garage rock newbies Sir & Sol are rooted in hip-hop’s casual approach to the studio.
“These random indie rock guys who don’t know anything about any of the subcultures we’re involved in are trying to interpret it for other people in the most generic terms, and they’re getting everything wrong,” says Hollywell, referencing journalists who interviewed him over the summer. “But I amplify the haters because I think it’s funny.” It’s true: year-round, he shares screenshots of commenters and highlighted review passages on his Instagram that state incorrect facts with brazen confidence. Instead of correcting it, he lets it slide, chalking it up to goofy mythmaking.
Another stellar unreleased song—the temporarily titled “Argue,” with a stomping beat, Santos’ clever percussive-like flourishes on console steel, and Winkler giggling mid-harmony—plays as Billiard enters the room in a plain off-white tee and blue jeans, still hushed but less shaken up from when we barged into his space earlier as he practiced fiddle. In a voice so quiet not even my recorder picked it up, he offers me a water. That’s when Santos finally arrives, sunglasses on, brown paper bag of fries in hand. He rarely talks onstage or in interviews, but after overhearing the new material, he starts chiming in, delighted by how it’s turned out.
Something has happened in my social circle which I can only describe as the Twisted Teens Effect: Every person I’ve recommended the band to ends up pleasantly enjoying it, only to text weeks later saying they suddenly can’t stop listening. Their records are endlessly replayable through meticulous design, but in a casual way. That unexpected fandom has grown over the past two years, with unlikely converts taking to the internet’s alleyways to spread the good word—and, in the process, annoying the doubters.
Once national press rolled in, Twisted Teens were accused of being an industry plant, with a few punks going so far as to call them a psyop. Particularly paranoid reads include the belief that the band dropped Florida Water Blues on punk label Going Underground before signing to Sub Pop as an astroturfing campaign. It’s terminally online fodder about a bunch of musicians who could not be more offline, and that naturally amuses Twisted Teens. Santos brings up the Geese psyop allegations and asks for clarification, having only just learned about it recently. Both he and Hollywell are baffled, but raise a point about the difference between honest and deceptive marketing, going back to Britpop and classic rock.
“We live in a culture where everything is a psyop, where your political candidates and food choices are astroturfed,” says Hollywell. “Remember four years ago when everyone had to have a Popeye’s chicken sandwich? Your entire life is a bunch of astroturf propaganda bullshit, and now these random kids’ managers hired people to do this shit and you’re jumping down their throats? It’s very disingenuous. They’re holding artists to a different standard. Now, would I let our managers do that? No fucking way, because that’s pathetic. We rule. It’s a flex to not do anything like that.” Everyone in the room bursts into laughter.
In Hollywell’s eyes, the reason Twisted Teens found broader popularity beyond the folk-punk world is because they value traditional popular music. He points to 1970s acts like the Buzzcocks and X-Ray Spex as examples, who played simple pop songs in the style of raw punk and got everyone to sing along. “Turns out if you just make a catchy song, you can play anything and people will like it,” he says. Learning the standards isn’t about lifting a chord formula, either; it’s about the act of repetition instilling a feeling in your bones and an ability to predict how an audience will react. “When you join a band here, you’re playing the hits,” says Santos. Everyone in the band, even their rotating cast of drummers, knows this. Twisted Teens are an amalgamation of buskers who each paid their dues on the streets for over a decade, and New Orleans is the final boss of the format. When he first moved here, Santos was so overwhelmed by the default standard of talent that he gave up on busking for months.
“Bob Dylan, the Beatles, all of these bands that pioneered songwriting in the 20th century were sitting on a street corner playing Woody Guthrie songs and ‘Sloop John B’ without a microphone,” says Hollywell. “When people come along to copy that, they don’t realize they’re copying the surface level, the development process. Contrary to how journalists covered it, the first wave of punk bands are very, very good musicians who played folk songs or in pub rock bands five nights a week over and over and over again. That background in simple songs makes things flow. Because when you’re playing for dollars, those B-sides ain’t hitting. When people sit around a fire singing folk music, they’re not doing the ninth song on a John Prine album. I think people are now getting very tired of vibes that cater to music nerdery. I love vibes! I love music nerdery! But they need an actual song.”
Cue the invitations to open for the Breeders and Kurt Vile, with the latter offering a full-on leg of his extensive tour. Meeting a hero like Kim Deal is surreal (“I still have a crush on her,” laughs Hollywell) and the artists themselves are “great,” but the realities of playing large-scale Live Nation venues weirds them out. “It’s like the void, an ocean of people that you can’t fucking see or connect with,” says Santos. “We’re just so far apart from each other on the stage, too, because it’s massive.” If they get big enough to warrant larger venues, Twisted Teens would rather replicate what Osees do by playing multiple nights in a mid-sized venue. Even that vastly differs from their previous headlining tours across dive bars, basements, and bizarre abandoned locations, but Twisted Teens are committed to still incorporating those into their routes; it just gets more complicated to pull off, is all.
It’s well past lunchtime, so Hollywell suggests Frady’s, one of their favorite sandwich spots. Everyone piles into his red pickup truck, a 20-year-old Toyota Tacoma, with Betty leading the charge. Santos and I climb into the truck bed as Winkler ducks into her own car, waving goodbye as she begins the nine-hour drive back home to Texas. Santos reveals he hasn’t left their neighborhood for weeks, a sentiment I learn is common for people on this side of New Orleans. We barely make it two blocks before a white van approaches from a perpendicular street and the driver leans out the window to ask where we’re going. “Frady’s!” Hollywell yells. “Wanna come?” The driver pulls their van off the road so it’s parked halfway on an empty lot, runs over in black jeans and a band tee with the sleeves cut off, and climbs into the truck bed as Hollywell jokingly pulls away. It’s Bob Ayo, the original bassist of Twisted Teens and the co-star of their “Florida Water Blues” music video, who’s lanky, easygoing, and the epitome of affable.
A woman with a gap-toothed smile takes our orders for fried oyster po’ boys, meatball subs, and muffulettas at the counter while a ceiling fan whirs overhead. Everything is packed tight and handwritten, from the chalkboard menu up high on the wall to the red Sharpie on the tip jar. We grab our paper-wrapped sandwiches one by one and eat outside, where Ayo fills me in on how he met Twisted Teens (playing folk-punk with Hollywell back in California), what he’s up to now (pedicabbing tourists around New Orleans), and who he performs with (Holy Locust, Yes Ma’am, plenty of jug bands). Like the rest of Twisted Teens, he too lived a nomadic life as a trainhopper and old-time fiddler before ending up in New Orleans. The longer the guys extol the freedom of roaming, the truer it seems that anywhere can be the big rock candy mountain with cigarette trees and alcohol springs if you exude the right camaraderie.
We cross the street to browse Parlour Books, a tiny used bookstore run by Hollywell’s friend Ray. It's tucked away in an alcove, with a cheery pink-and-green painted exterior and a spinning rack stuffed with paperbacks by the open door. Santos immediately lays eyes on a vintage book on practical sign painting, a niche topic that couldn’t be more relevant to him. Every year, Santos spends months back home in the Yukon as the official sign painter of Dawson City, preserving its history on behalf of the Canadian government. His work is crisp, playful, and nostalgic, replicating the exact fonts and presentations of centuries-old stylings for businesses and public parks alike. Recently, he’s started painting used saws as Twisted Teens merch, and the one-of-a-kind pieces fly off the table before they finish their shows.
As we browse, Hollywell admits he loves “weird, trashy fantasy written by Redditors” because “the MFA program utterly ruined all literature.” There are a few exceptions that he praises, though, including Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels and Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. Ray starts closing shop for the day and Santos feels weird being away from their block, so we check out and climb back into the pickup truck to return to Hollywell’s house, although not without a pit stop at Wagner’s, a 24-hour convenience store, to buy a case of Modelo and assorted drinks. Along the route, another driver yells out their window to say hi to Hollywell, while Ayo spots two friends on bicycles and greets them with a cheerful grin and full-body wave.
The five of us climb out of the truck and walk through Hollywell’s fence door, along the side of his house, and collapse into the backyard’s various metal chairs gathered around a splintering wooden table. Near the floating wooden patio, roughly 30 feet away, is a calico guinea pig eating a pile of spaghetti. “Aw man, he’s back,” says Billiard, deflated. Yesterday, he lured the guinea pig into a grocery cart, a temporary setup that’s breathable but inescapable, and pushed it onto his neighbor’s lawn to gather the pet. “The other guinea pig got eaten, and that’s the thing: this guinea pig knows the risks of what he’s doing right now, that there’s dogs back here, that his best friend got fucking picked up by a hawk,” says Hollywell. “It’s not safe but he doesn't give a fuck because he’s here for the vibes—and that’s everybody in New Orleans.”
Hollywell was born and raised around Santa Cruz, California, where a music magazine changed the course of his life by recommending guitarist Link Wray and dub-reggae producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. When he turned 14, Hollywell started taking drum lessons with Bay Area percussionist Jim Lemons, who would similarly alter his view of the world. “He played a Prince guitar solo for an hour until I could point out where the overdubs were,” he says, declaring it “the most valuable thing anyone has ever done for me in my life.” The second biggest piece of advice that stuck with Hollywell from those sessions was learning that Lemons still took drum lessons himself. “He’d say, ‘There’s still a man better than me, and until I’m better than him, I gotta go learn.’”
At 43, Hollywell looks back at his past with remarkable vividness. There was the decade spent sitting on a bucket playing fiddle in a Dystopia shirt, the years existing without electricity or technology while squatting inside an illegal shack in the dredges of New York City, the months in 2005 when he lived in a pre-Katrina New Orleans on the roof of a Rally’s with some cardboard and a backpack of belongings. To most, Hollywell is known as a co-founder of Blackbird Raum, a foundational anarcho folk-punk band of the 2000s. To others, he’s the barking frontman in Twisted Teens precursor Chardonnay, the lead guitarist in Bellringer, or the teacher giving private music lessons or leading others through waltzes and two-step dances.
To me, Hollywell is a raconteur, the kind you just don’t come across anymore. He regales me with more recent lore, like, there was the night Twisted Teens played an abandoned post office with a jacuzzi on the roof; there was being rescued by canoe when abandoned on the other side of the river with his bike in tow; there was guarding a weed farm for four nights, armed with only a shotgun, a cooler of lunch meat, and his fiddle, where he warded off robbers by trying to perfect the bowed triplet for hours. Compliment an innocuous item and he spins a yarn that makes you wonder if it’s gonna pay off. Magically, it always does. On The Holy Cross Tigers, he sings about snitches caving to cops in minutes flat, roses blooming from a split tree, and dirty jokes wasted on a prudish ex-lover. In “Look in the Mirror,” he pinpoints why we’re all talking about the same things by rote: “Book of life open, nobody bothers to read it.” It’s some of his finest regaling.
Santos is quiet at first, but once he settles in, he has plenty of tales of his own: a ghost haunting him for days after painting its portrait, the time he skinned a road-killed coyote for its pelt in a motel bathtub as a teenager. The tale of how he acquired his first pedal steel guitar from a Craigslist ad—in which he drove from Calgary to North Carolina to buy the coveted instrument and crashed on Hollywell's couch while he was out of town with a friend’s permission, only for the two eventual bandmates to meet years later—is riveting even in its shortened retelling to The Big Takeover. “We really pay attention to the esoteric stuff as Twisted Teens,” says Santos. “It’s a big part of our lives.”
Born and raised in the Philippines, Santos learned to play guitar at age eight, as was required for school, until his parents accidentally smashed the instrument in a fight. When his mother gifted him one again years later, he treasured it all the more. As his family started moving around for work—Guam, Canada, and later Greece—he opted to study art history in Toronto at the Ontario College of Art and Design. After one year, he dropped out, caught a train to Montreal, and fell for the train-hopping life instead. He busked for three years on fiddle, banjo, and guitar around Canada until tendonitis in his hand prevented him from bowing longer than “a tune or two,” but thankfully it hasn’t stopped him from drawing or painting portraits. Now, the 33-year-old splits his time between the Yukon, where he stays with a friend in his house converted from a 1898 brothel, and a handful of other cities, including this one, playing in country and Cajun bands or taking on painting commissions.
Even Santos’ mundane stories sound like character-building arcs in a rugged epic, never mind the ones involving animal run-ins. “I had a squirrel infestation at home, so every morning I’d wait to shoot them with a rifle while drinking my coffee,” he recounts. “I probably shot 12 of them, solved my infestation problem, and then the next morning I go in my backyard and there’s a grizzly bear knocking down all the squirrels. I have a .30-06 Winchester, which would maim it, but it’s illegal to shoot within town limits, so I bolted the doors and reported it in.”
“Think about the great conflicts of history: the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Axis and Allies, the Giants and the Dodgers, and then RJ versus those fucking squirrels in his house,” laughs Hollywell. “One time I left a window open and he lost it.”
“It was in the house! I came in with Chinese food and this squirrel was straight-up in my kitchen,” says Santos, exasperated. “I hate varmints.”
Billiard rarely chimes in, and when he does, his voice is hushed and gentle. He often tucks an acoustic guitar under his arm, plucks away mindlessly, and chooses the seat farthest away from a conversation without outright breaking the circle. Born in Atlanta as the youngest brother in a family full of fiddle players, Billiard learned to play guitar at age five to back them up. Today, the 31-year-old is sneakily skilled in ways beyond classical picking or noisy shredding. Whereas Billiard hopped on a handful of songs for Twisted Teens’ second and third albums, he’s fully on board for The Holy Cross Tigers and whatever comes next, both in his eyes and theirs. Sometimes he joins local acts Beau Cheval and Jonathan Henley on guitar. He comes most alive when discussing an upcoming screening of Harmony Korine’s 2007 film Mister Lonely, which deeply moved him years ago. So many of his movements strike me as carefully considered but not necessarily anxious. Later, Caspian describes Billiard as the smartest guy he knows.
A crucial band member is missing from this gathering: bassist Sonya Badigian. She’s secretly the rubber band that launched Twisted Teens outside of their DIY folk-punk circuit. Born and raised in Wakefield, Rhode Island, she taught herself fiddle as a teenager while spinning 78 RPM records. (Yes, everyone in Twisted Teens plays the fiddle except their current drummer, Howe Person of the Deslondes, who, by Hollywell’s count, is the band’s 13th drummer.) By her twenties, Badigian spent months at a time “chasing tunes” across the country. “If you’re going to play American vernacular music of any kind, or music based on it, like rock’n’roll, to get the whole picture you have to move through the space of it, travel through it, meet people,” she says over email a few days later. “Anywhere you go in America, if you’re tuned to the right frequency, you can find people chilling playing fiddle and banjo with each other. Always a couch to crash on or a place to pitch a tent. Always somewhere to go next.”
Eventually she settled down in Durham, North Carolina, to live closer to the old-time fiddle scene, where folks immerse themselves in that pre-bluegrass genre born from both African American and traditionalist Appalachian folk music. When not working a demanding day job, her main side-project is Hard Drive (“We’re active like a tortoise is active: heavy-hitting, but real slow and steady”), but she’s always game to jam with others. Watch any clip of Badigian playing fiddle: That’s where her spirit soars.
Not only is old-time fiddle music a community, but it’s foundational to the Twisted Teens sound. “You understand how to drive a dance and can learn quickly by ear,” she says, unintentionally explaining the band’s addictive formula. “That’s how it can be in fiddle music: You can just sit around and play tunes with someone from the time you’re 20 ‘til you die, and you don’t need to put out an album or make it official. You can let the depth and longevity of that connection be its own reward.”
Hollywell credits Badigian as being the go-getter of the band, even before she joined their lineup. In early 2024, he sent her voice memos of the songs that would become Twisted Teens’ self-titled debut, and she immediately got on their wavelength. Badigian spent hours on the phone discussing the logistics of touring, rentals, merch, and more; she offered to help handle the backend work. “It was DIY in the realest sense,” she says. “I didn’t think you could die from too many emails, but now I know it’s possible.”
After an early gig at Memphis’ Lamplighter Lounge, Badigian remembered that Goner Records, the long-running underground punk label and record store, was around the corner. She mustered up the courage to walk into the shop, introduce herself, and pitch Twisted Teens’ debut album to the employee working that day. Convinced, he bought a few records and cassettes wholesale. Two hours later, the employee messaged to say customers bought the records straight off the turntable while it was playing in the shop; he even bought a cassette himself. Sure enough, she got a call from Eric Friedl, the label’s co-owner and founder, inviting Twisted Teens to play Goner Fest 2025, and they started shipping huge boxes up to the shop every few weeks to meet demand. A European tour, strung together from old contacts, followed suit. Twisted Teens had materialized.
Nobody gets big this fast, and surely not in the punk world. It’s true—even Twisted Teens agree. That’s why a new band bleeding the edges of garage, punk, Americana, and indie rock is deceiving when old heads who’ve remained involved since the aughts remember Hollywell strictly from his crusty folk-punk days before smartphones and social media. It’s surprising to see just how many ties the members of Twisted Teens have to people all around the country despite, or possibly because of, that fact. “Now because Twisted Teens is a success, I’m gonna pay taxes for the first time in my entire life,” laughs Hollywell.
Despite his long history as a musician, Hollywell never owned proper recording gear until the pandemic, when he bought two microphones and his own computer. Around Mardi Gras 2024, he stumbled on a lo-fi, blown-out filter for guitar and drum machine that blew his mind, and ran to Santos to ask him to riff over the track. Two months later, they released their debut album as Twisted Teens. That feverish obsession with writing and recording music together hasn’t let up in the two years since then. “I would feel like an abject failure if we weren’t the best band in the entire world,” Hollywell says with a straight face. “I’m really excited when another band seems to be better than us, because I want them to be the best—so then I can go become even better than that. It’s basically the plot of Naruto.”
With one foot in the band as a musician and one foot out as their earliest listener, Badigian has the perfect view of who Twisted Teens really are as a group. When I ask what their mission statement would be if they had one, she sums it up succinctly: “Everything is deeply funny, but it’s not exactly a joke. The point is to get everyone to dance, then to realize something, then go back to dancing.”
The Holy Cross Tigers lives by that credo. Loosely written in the wake of a breakup, Twisted Teens’ fourth album finds dark comedy in bitter pain. The knife enters after Hollywell’s breakup with his ex-girlfriend while vacationing in Albania; the knife twists when she continues to live with him in New Orleans, he breaks his leg, and he inevitably slides into heavy drinking. Hollywell dug himself out by writing his way through it—the slow dance sway of “I Spend My Time Crying,” the rowdy admission of defeat in “Blue Rose”—while Santos and Billiard’s nimble performances function as arms laced through Hollywell’s own to pick him back up. No amount of sorrow could stop Hollywell from injecting Twisted Teens’ music with the cheeky twang that fills a crowded dancefloor, though; the rose-colored glasses of “When We First Met” look good on everyone, including him and you. When in doubt, there’s Santos, sliding along the steel guitar in “Be An Angel” to revive a broken heart.
Twisted Teens joked they were contractually obligated to write a grunge song after signing to Sub Pop, prompting Billiard to claim that modifying any Beatles chord progression to stay major instead of going minor gets the job done. The example he played in jest turned into the backbone of “Darker the Night Is the Brighter I See,” the closing track on The Holy Cross Tigers and the most beautiful song in Twisted Teens’ discography. Its warped vocal harmonies are ripe and sour, including guest appearances from the band’s friends, and off-kilter squiggles on steel guitar deviate from their usual pattern. Twisted Teens’ songs usually make me close my laptop and go outside, but this one in particular courts the urge to lie flat on my back and look at the stars.
The band is still adjusting to the normal aspects of label life, like abiding by an album rollout plan, scheduling press interviews, and filling out paperwork. Hollywell realizes he’s become “rusty as fuck” at his other interests—playing fiddle, reading tarot, cooking from scratch—to spend every waking moment on Twisted Teens, but he’s fine with that. The headiness of recounting their entire lives has zapped them of energy, though, and they ask to pause for an hour. Santos walks to his place to nap, Billiard packs a bag to catch the Mister Lonely screening, Ayo drives to practice for a gig, and Hollywell sprawls on his bed to call his long-distance girlfriend living in Halifax, who he talks to for over an hour. Later, he confesses how good it feels to be in a committed, monogamous relationship—for the first time in 10 years—with her specifically, because of how grounded yet creative she is, like a balm for his soul. The sun sets, the mosquitoes come out, and Hollywell serves Betty her kibble dinner in a giant glass mixing bowl before sliding a black leather vest over his band tee. “You ready to hear some old-school Italian string music?”
Betty hops into the backseat of Hollywell’s pickup truck, panting happily above the armrest, and I take the passenger seat. On the way to Vaughan's Lounge, Hollywell reminisces about the queer cafes and alternative subculture in Santa Cruz that were pushed out for expensive corporate homogeneity. At least he still has his friendships, especially those made in Blackbird Raum. Beyond the royalties that roll in from his old folk-punk band, it’s the conversations with former members like washboard player Casey Mattson, who went on to co-write for Oliver Tree and produce for Tinashe, that keep the flame alive.
As we pull up to Vaughan's, Betty leaps out and takes off, trotting up to the historic dive bar with a patched roof like she owns the place. Ray the bookseller waves, as do a handful of other pals sitting on the patio chairs and built-in bench lining the exterior wall, but Hollywell tells them we will join in a bit. First, he needs to see the live band performing tonight: a four-piece playing banjo, accordion, viola, and acoustic guitar with the jaunty charm meant to soundtrack romantic views in Sicily. Hollywell immediately drops cash in the tip jar and then stands back to soak up the music. The room is covered in tinsel, string lights, and rainbow-hued papel picado hanging from the ceiling. To the side of the bar, a small countertop is covered with homemade meals provided for free by patrons, potluck-style: vegan spaghetti sauce, whole wheat bread, a towering confection labeled “my grandma’s Italian creme cake” in black Sharpie on a ripped piece of notepad paper.
When Santos arrives an hour later, a friend asks him how he’s feeling ahead of Twisted Teens’ big tour across Australia. His eyes light up. He says he’s most excited to see wombats. They start questioning what the biggest islands on Earth are, which leads to Santos revealing he wanted to study steel guitar because it was invented in Hawaii. “I spent five years nerding out on steel players and all the different styles,” he explains, bringing up the current trend of pedal steel as background ambiance, Jerry Byrd as the king of tone, and Greece cult-hero Kostas Bezos. “When the Hawaiian craze reached Athens in the 1920s, he picked up a steel guitar and merged it with traditional rebetiko music.” That’s when Santos takes off with the most fascinating topic I’ve ever heard discussed in a bar: Greek’s underground traditional music, the instrumental origins in Istanbul, and a ban that relates to opium dens and Nazi Germany.
Over the next two hours, friends stroll by, on bike and on foot, stopping to catch up for a while before continuing on. Nobody is on their phones. Everything feels mellow and unhurried, as if time stopped long ago and there’s nothing urgent to attend to. I expected Twisted Teens to be raucous partiers in person—after all, onstage, Hollywell throws back beers and dances like a punk Ernest P. Worrell imitating Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” moves—but they maintain a perpetual state of chill throughout the night. In many ways, their personalities embody an endless summer break.
It’s nearly 100 degrees, the dog days of New Orleans’ summer, where the humidity starts to weigh on locals, too. With drooping eyebrows, Hollywell bids farewell and invites me to hang out again tomorrow. I stick around, chatting with Santos and Ayo about music and travel adventures. Billiard, meanwhile, has spent the past half hour quietly working on a crossword at the edge of the table. There’s only two words left to complete: the Bible book that follows Jonah (he’s near-certain it’s Micah, but won’t ink it in unless he’s certain) and a three-letter word for the non-covenant. He refuses to give up.
It’s October 1st, and it’s still hot as ever in New Orleans as I knock on Hollywell’s front door again. Santos, Billiard, Ayo, and Hollywell are gathered in the living room discussing music, as usual, and the natural light makes the birds and curlicues that Santos hand-painted around the doorframes pop. Only now do I realize there’s no TV in the house. Billiard is curled over an acoustic guitar playing licks and song excerpts, including Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song.” It’s like overhearing a jazz talent warm up before a ritzy lounge gig, except he’s dressed in purple sunglasses and a T-shirt one size too big.
Twisted Teens talk about the new record they’re making, which is currently nameless. Even if it had one, they wouldn’t refer to it by that title. Instead, they reference each album by color—the orange album, the green album—as part of an ongoing theme they plan to continue forever: solid background color, retro band photo, and their name in that now-recognizable bubbly font. Hollywell flags the latter for an important clarification: Makin’ Out’s Caitlin Angelica designed that font, not them, and he wants her to get credit for it.
Ayo’s dog, a pit bull mix named Butter, jumps onto the couch as we discuss old train-hopping stories, their Mardi Gras hijinks, and their favorite local bands playing Cajun music and psychedelic cumbia. The deeper into winter it gets, the more punks show up in New Orleans and crazier the shows get, they explain. When asked what keeps them in New Orleans after a lifetime of never staying put, they credit it to the music scene. “You have to understand: 10 years ago, this block was a burgeoning, underground, festering culture of people doing such cool shit,” says Santos. “I always attune it to the Greenwich Village of the early ’60s. I’m quite sad that it’s not really like that anymore, but that was pre-Covid, when you could pay rent busking two or three times a month.” Hollywell nods in agreement, and shouts out all the graffiti artists and other creatives who are still nearby. “That was the rhizome and we’re the mushroom that came out of that.”
A part of them will always long to be on the road, though, if only for the magic of meeting new people and remembering how little you need to find true pleasure each day. Perhaps most telling are the items they always took with them when train-hopping years ago: a polyester Little Walter T-shirt that became a performance uniform (Hollywell), an extra-large raccoon pelt repurposed as a sleeping mat (Santos), and the most sensible answer of toilet paper (Billiard).
Inevitably, the conversation steers towards the collapse of leisure. After all that time spent traveling across the country, jamming with back-porch musicians, crashing in squats, sharing cheap meals, and rethinking the purpose of power in all forms, the members of Twisted Teens hold radical beliefs about bettering the world without idealism or political infighting clouding their views. It’s easy to guess what Hollywell holds close for guidance—Crass, tarot cards, Ursula K. Le Guin—even before spotting his stick-and-poke of the former’s band logo or his dual Tom Waits tattoos: the titular lyric from “The Earth Died Screaming” on his left arm (“The earth died screaming/while I lay dreaming”) and a line from “Hold On” wrapped around the right (“It’s so hard to dance that way/When it’s cold and there’s no music”). Meanwhile, his consistent embrace of Daoism is quiet and surfaces through subtle actions instead. As he puts it in The Holy Cross Tigers cut “Armed With a Vision,” “Hear you talking all ya politic/But I never see ya take a risk.”
Santos and Billiard quietly leave the room, presumably to continue playing music, but in private. It’s impossible to miss how restless their fingers get after a while. Hollywell and I decide to go for lunch, so we climb into his pickup truck to get BBQ at The Joint. Inside, the walls are covered in brown beadboard, every bar stool is cracked, and signage is plastered all over the walls. We place our orders for brisket, mac and cheese, and a slice of key lime pie, and sit in the back patio area. Hollywell keeps Betty leashed, per the restaurant’s orders, but walks over to a trash can and bends over until he’s waist-deep, rifling through to find a rib bone she can eat. No luck. “I guess it’s too hot for people to be eating out here today,” he says. When a server brings our plates over, she gushes over Betty and offers to pull her some food from the back and a bowl of cold water.
In between bites, we chat about the collaborations that sprang up around The Holy Cross Tigers. Punk icon Martin Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos shot portraits of Twisted Teens in Chicago this summer. Alice Gerrard, the 92-year-old bluegrass legend, reads part of a passage that appears at the end of “Every Flower.” Los Angeles director and producer Mama Hot Dog turned a pile of trash into a hypnotic music video for “Stalks.” “It’s like a movie where we’re crawling out and all these old heads are like, ‘We support you! Save rock’n’roll!’” he laughs. As we return our trays and head back outdoors, Hollywell says it’s all surreal and flattering, but ultimately it comes back to making music he loves and getting to share its effects with others.
Across the street is an empty lot where the grass has grown tall enough to look like a field of wheat blowing in the wind. Hollywell follows Betty as she trots across it, pausing at one point to sprawl on the ground. He gives her a scratch and tells her they have to go home soon so he can get back to recording. I’m reminded of one of the first things he said when I showed up yesterday morning: “It’s wild there’s people who wake up in the morning and do this shit for a living but don’t enjoy a second of it, and then wonder why nobody gives a shit about their music anymore.” Yes, it’s true, Twisted Teens can’t stop making songs at the speed of light. But nobody is happier about that than them.
Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly identified a lunch order as a fried clam po’ boy sandwich. It was a fried oyster po’ boy sandwich. We regret the error.