Twisted Teens have always been a hard band to pin down, but never more so than on Florida Water Blues. They ring of peak Parquet Courts submerged in Deep-South algae and the smooth whine of Ramon “RJ” Santos’ console steel, but their affinity for braiding absurd specifics with gut-punch aphorisms reeks of David Berman. Sometimes Caspian “CPN” Hollywell croons with Dylanesque emotion over 2020s alt-country guitar (see: “Sun Go Down”), and sometimes their drum machine sounds possessed by Big Black-era Steve Albini (see: the bullet-spray percussion at the top of “Concealed Weepin’”). Sometimes they pluck at strings like Johnny Cash (“Business”), and sometimes they layer samples of shape-note choral music until a song is less a song than a black hole of harmonic noise (“Riding”). The album opens with what feels like the Platonic ideal of a Twisted Teens song, a ripping head-bopper with country twang and Sunbathing Animal in its DNA, and it ends with what is arguably its inverse: three minutes of a bittersweet yet earnest acoustic ballad, then two of utterly amelodic, experimental noise. One moment, CPN and RJ are backpackers staking claims in familiar sonic country; the next, they’re astronauts charting a new moon.
The band’s central philosophy is one of contradiction, taken straight from—sure, why not—the Major Arcana: “You got to be The Fool and you got to be The Hermit at the same time,” CPN told Paste last week. (They are possibly the only crust-punks in history to draw significant inspiration from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck.) As editor Matt Mitchell wrote in that feature, “Twisted Teens want their music to be naive and ignorant but also mystical and world-weary.” That binary opposition is a driving force throughout Florida Water Blues: “Girl, clean your fucking room!” lives in the same song as “I’ve visions with the flesh-colored pleasers / Visions like the Oracle at Delphi in the cave eating slime.” The rollicking, apathy-laced “Concealed Weepin’” throws off a verse about a “little fucker with a big attitude” who “was not considered super duper cool,” then ruminates on the denial of physical expression through false grief. Even the texture of their music deals in opposing forces: RJ’s console steel perpetually balloons up and down, all smooth twang and keening wails beneath CPN’s signature idiosyncratic growl, raspy enough to make the listener feel a physical compulsion to clear their own throat. But as CPN sings, “Opposites create one another.”
Blame the Clown—which came out a mere six months ago and was so good it topped Paste’s list of Best Albums of 2026 So Far back in June—was breathless with raucous power-pop anthems, the whole thing performed with a snaggle-toothed grin. It was an unstoppable force of pure energy, each song an earworm that squirmed through the brain so tangibly that you started to feel like RFK Jr. Despite coming into being at the same time, Florida Water Blues, by contrast, is Twisted Teens’ “blue” album: the roiling, churning comedown after a manic high. It’s the less immediate of the two, so at the moment, my loyalty still lies with the heart-racing fervor of Blame the Clown—but ask me again in a few months when I’m equally familiar with Florida Water Blues, and my answer might change.
The album is populated by characters, though they aren’t always human. There are brief short-story vignettes of mundane misery: “Dancer” sings of a down-on-her-luck prostitute, “Javelina” of a hunted loved one, “Concealed Weepin’” of an ostracized schoolboy, “Business” of a cruel politician with a penchant for chewing ice and abusing her power. (Between “Business,” “Javelina,” and “Weather The Season,” there’s something of a political triptych hidden in the album’s midsection: they’re stories of the corrupt deceiving the sincere, the tyrannical persecuting the outspoken, the powerful poisoning all wells of public information.) Sometimes the character is a thing, a feeling, a metaphor: the ship in “Riding,” the spiritual force in “Guiding Thunder.”
And the Deep South is a character in its own right, brought to life in songs like “Swamp” and “Florida Water Blues” (which might be Twisted Teens’ best track to date). Both boast great opening lines: the former kicks off with “I live in a crazy swamp just about in the crotch of America / Smells like ket and two-piece chicken / And the air’s all made of bacteria,” while the other plays on the famous Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel with “You’ve had about a hundred beers of solitude.” (Both feel Berman-esque; the latter in particular calls to mind the final verse on “Trains Across the Sea:” “In twenty-seven years / I’ve drunk fifty thousand beers / And they just wash against me / Like the sea into a pier.”)
Together, they’re a one-two punch, a doom-and-gloom sink and a tongue-in-cheek swim. “Swamp” is soaked in fatalism, CPN singing of decomposition, sinking into the mire, and taunting alligators like he has a death wish (“At the bridge round three in the morning throwin’ pennies at the old alligator / If he doesn’t eat on me now, he’s sure gonna eat on me later”). But when he crows “You can drink that Florida water and go blind” two songs later, there’s something like pride in it. I grew up in the Florida panhandle myself—swimming in Wakulla Springs, sunbathing on the wooden platforms floating in the water then splashing away whenever a gator clambered up beside me—and even though “Florida Water Blues” was ostensibly written about the popular New Orleans perfume of the same name, I’ve yet to hear anything that sounds so tailor-made for the Florida water of my home. “I need Florida water just to make me tough,” CPN growls out at the song’s end. “It’ll make me tough.” Tough like gator skin, like the clink of pennies rolling off hard scales.
While Blame the Clown’s songs were structured to deliver hook after tasty hook, the arrangements on Florida Water Blues seem to focus more on using the form to extend the content. The sliding of the steel on “Hand Me a Cigarette” injects a melancholy between the lines, making the titular request feel like a resigned acquiescence to a slow euthanasia by throat cancer. The instrumentation behind the spoken word breakdown partway through “Guided Thunder” builds and builds as CPN’s speech grows ever more manic—to the point where his words become impossible to make out beneath the noise—before both are suddenly cut off mid-beat, mid-sentence, by a hyper-precise drum riff that seems to snap the song back into place. Rather than resuming where it left off, the track skips ahead (or back, depending on how you look at it) to the chorus. The last line, fully audible above the din, was “I pray for a song just to move the waters,” and then, like a divine intervention, the hand of god (the songwriter, the author of the tale) swooped in with an abrupt course correction after the protagonist went off the rails.
But the structure of the gorgeous closer “Sun Go Down” might blow the rest out of that Florida water. We’ve yet to see Twisted Teens really inhabit this melodic landscape: a good ole country crooner, the sharp-edged punk inflections that permeate the rest of their discography replaced entirely by warm acoustics and warmer-still harmonies provided by Darcey Blye. It’s a sunset song through and through, but a sunset is a kind of death, too; the day murdered by the night. Except the album doesn’t end on the afterglow of day, on CPN’s sunset-suffused plea for the animals to flee their cages before the descent of dark. Instead, after the final verse, there’s a beat of silence—a deceptive “ending”—that’s suddenly swallowed up by a yawning, harrowing maw with teeth made of creaking strings and low, almost backward-sounding synths. Then, gradually, a new noise trickles in atop the slow churn of the horror-movie soundtrack: little high-pitched pin-pricks of sound, almost like stars peppering the sky. Only a few at first, but they grow in number by the second, layering and layering. They move towards the front of the mix as the groans of night grow from something concentrated and sharp into a broad, shapeless expanse. Eventually, the bright twinkles begin to fade once more. A faint cicada-like sound scritches in the background. The album ends in the breath before morning arrives.
If Blame the Clown was a bright and garish mid-day, Florida Water Blues is the descent from sunset into dusk into blue night. But just as the sun goes down, it rises again—two sides of the same gleaming coin. Both albums were recorded at the same time, after all. Opposites, as always, create one another. [Going Underground]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
