punk this week: twisted teens, straw man army + 15 more

Hey, it’s Punk This Week. It’s the third time this year see/saw has found itself musing on America’s favorite band Twisted Teens in this weekly punk and rock’n’roll recommendations column. There’s also an essential new wrinkle to the Straw Man Army discography, plus some rippers from Jake King, United Stare, the Etters, and many more. It’s also Bandscamp Friday, the semi-regular holiday where band scamps can have a treat.

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Twisted Teens: The Holy Cross Tigers [Sub Pop]

With every song on Twisted Teens’ Sub Pop debut, Caspian Hollywell boils everything down to one phrase that he returns to again and again. Sometimes it’s visual (“stalks of yarrow,” “look in the mirror”) and elsewhere there’s conviction (“armed with a vision,” “darker the night is the brighter I see”). This quality was there to some degree on the first three Twisted Teens records. 

Yet where there was previously an emphasis on more rollicking storytelling (and you don’t even have to listen to their records to know they’re good at weaving a yarn), The Holy Cross Tigers plays like the work of someone who was recently knocked for a loop and only ambulatory by necessity. It opens with infatuation and closes in reflection, and with each replay, all those repeated statements start to feel like someone trying to make sense of the past. 

It’s got all the things that make a Twisted Teens record great—the steel warmth, hoarse-as-fuck vocals, and drum machine fill formula is intact—and sticking to that well-honed aesthetic lends to that bleary “upright because I’ve got to be” hungover feeling. The band’s notorious for barreling endlessly ahead, and maybe that’s part of working through the hard shit.