Twisted Teens’ Caspian Hollywell Was Radicalized by a Snitching Daycare Teacher

The HT Questionnaire is where our favorite artists reveal their true selves by answering a series of searching, thoughtful, and sometimes random questions.

“I’m hungover as shit, man,” Caspian Hollywell says, groggily, by way of introduction on a Friday afternoon in early October, holding his phone a little too close to his face. Generally speaking, these are not the words a music journalist wants to hear at the top of an interview. But within a few short minutes, the Twisted Teens leader is at full speed, reeling off the kind of punk-rock mission statement that would make Joe Strummer pump his fist in approval. 

“We have a spiritual duty to bring fire energy to people, because they’ll never heal from their trauma or find true resistance or wake up to the fucked reality of our existence through this whiner and depression culture,” Hollywell starts, revving up. “You listen to most indie rock and you think, This person never gets horny or mad. They’re presenting a false vision of humankind that’s for this NPR reality of social decorum, but that’s not real. People need to experience vibrancy, or they’ll wither away and die. They won’t fuck each other. They’ll just repress and mask and be in the economy. So I have to water the great tree of punk music and bring it back to its original essence and encourage everyone else who’s willing to move their bodies and cry and get angry. Twisted Teens is a spiritual project for the whole of rock and roll.”

Coming out of almost any other singer’s mouth, this type of talk would come off as pure blabbery. But Twisted Teens more than backed it up throughout 2026 with not one, not two, but three gloriously ramshackle albums that will have critics seriously mulling over how the bounty figures into their imminent year-end lists. Hollywell practically licks his lips with anticipation as he imagines such debates. “I’m trying to start arguments, that’s my whole plan,” he says. “I would love it if people would beef about which one is best.” For the record, Hollywell says February’s Blame the Clown is his current favorite, though this month’s Sub Pop debut, The Holy Cross Tigers, was at the top of his personal list for a while, too; I’m personally partial to July’s Florida Water Blues. “It doesn’t really matter,” he eventually shrugs. “It’s all just catchy songs, man.”

Twisted Teens songs are catchy. They’re also sneakily smart. And kinda dumb. Sometimes raunchy. Or heartbroken. Silly. Serious. Mostly danceable. Occasionally cryable. And that emotional gumbo is the whole point—a reflection of humankind’s endlessly complicated existence rendered in two-and-a-half minute, garage-rock bursts about smoking cigarettes and fucking, and the ecstasy and agony of their adopted hometown of New Orleans. “I like a movie that seems like a comedy but that’s really a tragedy,” Hollywell says. “Our band is fucking grief-ridden. We started three months after my best friend got shot through the heart, but you would never know that unless you interrogated the music on an empathetic level.”

Hollywell gives me a quick tour of Twisted Teens headquarters. It’s a plot of land in the city’s Holy Cross neighborhood that includes his own small home, which he bought for cheap and renovated himself, along with a few little houses where his friends and bandmates live, and a yellow school bus. “It’s like a commune where no one has meetings or gives a fuck about being in a commune,” he says. The surrounding area can get wild, and Hollywell recalls one time when he stepped in to stop a father from beating his 11-year-old child. There are people smoking crack and there are bullets being fired. Hollywell takes the chaos and the camaraderie in stride. “It’s like Seinfeld, where everyone is walking into each other’s living room all the time,” he says, “but with guns.” 

Twisted Teens, which also includes steel guitarist RJ Santos and electric guitarist Mel Billiard, work quickly, churning out reams of tunes in a short time before ruthlessly canning the lesser efforts. Hollywell says they made The Holy Cross Tigers in his humble home studio—mostly using a single microphone to track everything—in just two weeks, and that the album is a quick and dirty snapshot of his life at that moment. He was going through a breakup at the time, which explains a timeless lament like “I Spend My Time Crying.”

But there’s also a song like “Lock and Key,” where he takes aim at rats who squeal to the cops. It was inspired by a guy who turned state’s evidence on a drug dealer that lived around the block. “I thought it was funny as fuck to make a stop snitching anthem for indie rockers,” he says, laughing. “They’re all in college, they don’t know shit about that.” He adds that the original version of the song tackled a decidedly different, and more risqué, topic. “It was about when you’re dating someone, and they have a fetish for, like, DD/LG—Daddy Dom, Little Girl,” he explains. “It’s a thing that people are into—not me—where the dude pretends to be, like, a priest that molests his daughter or something like that. I was dating someone who was really into that, and this song was roasting that shit, because I was like, ‘No, I can’t do all that.’ But I realized people weren’t going to get what the song was about—they’re gonna think it’s some Epstein-level shit—and I didn’t want to catch any flack over it.” All in all, a wise decision.

Even though The Holy Cross Tigers only came out a couple of weeks ago, Twisted Teens have already handed in their next album to Sub Pop. Inspired by Jonathan Richman, Violent Femmes, and New Zealand indie rock originators the Clean, it’s a mix of duets with the Texas singer Natalie Hanne Winkler, raw iPhone memos, and would-be radio hits. “It’s bursting at the seams of life,” Hollywell says. Then there’s another record he says the band might release on their own next year via vinyl and cassette only. Then he might take a break. Not to rest, exactly, but to gather more ideas—more life—to kickstart the next creative cascade.

Below, Hollywell delves further into his personal history and foundational beliefs—and tells a story about his uncle’s smelly dog—while fielding questions from our HT Questionnaire.

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How would you describe your personal relationship with AI?

Caspian Hollywell: Bro, I don’t even like light bulbs. I literally worship Mother Nature. I’m not fucking with AI at all. 

I mean, I dropped out of school when I was 19 and lived in the woods on and off until I was around 32. I literally lived in a 8-by-12-foot hut with no running water or electricity in a state park in Santa Cruz for over a decade. I built this shack and stayed there rent free with my big-ass dog and my girlfriend at the time. It’s still there, but I don’t even want to go back because it’s too sad.

What was your life like when you lived in the shack?

I would just play fiddle and smoke a lot of weed. I would have a campfire and grill sausages and write in my journal. I had a little radio and there was this really good station in town that would play Zapp and Rick James, and all that good ’80s music. So I would just sit out there and chill. Then I would hitchhike or take a bus to town and just kick it with the buds—go to the fucking Planet Fitness or a punk show. Just be a member of the community. It actually was a viable lifestyle for me because, being in DIY bands, I had no overhead. So if we made $600 bucks on tour, it was gravy. 

I was also working in the weed world, so for two months out of the year I was trimming. I’d be up there on weed mountain with my dog, playing fiddle for three days straight. Sometimes people would leave the farm and I’d have to guard it with a shotgun.

Did you live anywhere else during that time?

The shack was my home base, but when life got dramatic in Santa Cruz I’d run to Oakland, or I would rent an apartment for a few months here and there if it got cold. But the problem is, when you’re used to a lifestyle of zero overhead, where you just live in a redwood forest with all your friends, it’s hard to leave that. I essentially got stuck there. It was a crazy wake-up call coming out to New Orleans, and I was washing dishes and pedicabbing. Before that, I never really worked in my life.

When I was living in the shack, I was just practicing seven hours a day: guitar, drums, fiddle, banjo, piano, anything. So now I’ve got the skills where I don’t really have to try so hard. You just do shit. You don’t want to be puzzling about the finished product, that’s a capitalist way to do things.

A capitalist is like, We need corn, and they convert 10 million hectares of land to corn fields and use a ton of nitrogen fertilizer, which all goes into the Mississippi River and is super destructive. It’s computer-brain thinking. You shouldn’t do that. When you think about goals, make a really good garden that incidentally produces things. If you just build your skills and retain your passion, then when you harvest you’ll have a little bit of all these fruits and vegetables instead of only corn. If you go down to the traditional farming methods in Southeast Asia, like 200 years ago, peasant farmers worked two months out of the year, just like I did at the weed farms, because they developed agricultural methods that were so low-energy. That’s what Twisted Teens is. It’s an agricultural method that produces things on its own.

If you weren’t a musician, what would you be doing right now?

Tarot is my major passion, so I’d be reading and writing about that. I was actually writing a book about the tarot when the Teens took off—I need to finish that book, after I’m done making 7,000 albums with this fucking band!

I did tarot readings for a year at a Santa Muerte temple here in New Orleans. I was reading for random Honduran and Nicaraguan ladies, trying to help them make psychological breakthroughs, and they didn’t give a fuck. They’re just like, “Is my husband fucking someone else?” And I’m like, “Bitch, yes he is. She works at the office.” [laughs] If they’re coming to me, they already know that man’s cheating on them. That’s the thing about tarot reading, it just trains you on your intuition. So if you already trust your intuition, you don’t really need to pull a card.

One time, this man came in, and his wife had died, and everyone in the family blamed him. They thought he was an asshole. This man had crazy, crazy, crazy grief on him, and I knew there was nothing a fucking tarot card could do to help. So I did something that any spiritual practitioner would tell you never to do; I did Jesus stuff, where you take someone else’s pain. I was like, I’m happy, you’re miserable, I’ll take it on a little bit. I held my hands on his head and empathically absorbed some of what he was going through. That’s the dumbest shit you can do—it’s like having unprotected psychic sex with people. The main spiritual practitioner there had to pour coconut water over my head afterwards. He was like, “Don’t do that.” But I felt bad for this guy. I did the best I could.

If you could have anyone on earth sit down and listen to your new album in full, who would it be?

Kevin Gates. I love him—though he pissed me off because I went to see his ass and he only played like 30 seconds of each song. I actually wouldn’t need him to listen to my band. I would just talk to him about some crazy spiritual shit, because I got institutionalized five years ago, and the entire time I was mainly listening to “Cartel Swag” by Kevin Gates. 

Some of the sexuality of Twisted Teens—and the thing we do in our songs where we act like we’re saying a bunch of shit, and then open our eyes and say some philosophical shit, and then go back to saying bullshit—I got all that from Kevin Gates. He’s one of my biggest influences.

What is the most radicalizing experience of your life so far?

When I was 5, I got in deep shit for urinating outside, after a teacher told me to do it. She was just like, “Piss against a tree.” And then the main person at the daycare saw me, and I got kicked out. I told him, “That teacher said it was OK.” But of course that teacher didn’t want to lose their job over me pissing against the tree, so she just told him I was lying.

As a kid I was so amazed to find out that people would throw a child under the bus like that. Now I understand it. That teacher was probably one paycheck away from losing her apartment. And I’m so thankful for her, because at that moment I realized to never have any type of faith in any person with authority over you.

I just don’t really believe in this world at all. Obviously the same things piss me off that piss off other people, like ICE, but I’m not a big believer in education or democracy or electricity. [laughs] All these myths. To me it’s more of a first principles thing of there being a spiritual commitment to not allowing others to have power over me, and also not having power over others, which I call “P.O.O.” It’s important to absolutely reject all power relations like that.

What is something your grandmother told you that you’ll never forget?

My grandmother was British. My cultural background is insane because my family are these British socialists who moved to West Virginia. My great-grandfather was a very well-known trade unionist in England. So I’m super book learn-y in one way and ignorant as fuck in other ways. 

So imagine this old-ass British grandma named Marjorie. And then my uncle had this crazy dog named Badger, who smelled really bad and was always humping your leg and doing weird shit. So one day when I was 14, I was sitting next to my grandmother at the table, and Badger started messing with my leg. I was trying to push him away and eventually I put my weight down on Badger a little bit—I wasn’t trying to hurt the dog, I just kicked it basically. And then my grandmother, utterly deadpan, looks over to me and goes, “Are you playing footsie with me?” Because I had just been stomping on my grandmother’s foot.