The second verse of “Every Flower” features a self-reflective declaration. “How could you bottle on up the firefly?/Leave it wild and let it out of the jar”, singer Caspian Hollywell hollers on the penultimate track of Twisted Teens’ third album of 2026, The Holy Cross Tigers. It’s an invigorating mission statement for the New Orleans quintet, whose barrelling, twangy punk makes almost every other contemporary band sound tame by comparison.
Much like its constrained firefly, “Every Flower” sees Twisted Teens bursting at the cracks of their metaphorical jar of genre constraints. Whilst the core of the song sees the band employ their garage-punk sound to a new sinister extreme – RJ Santos’ pedal steel sounds like the desperate howling of the wind – it’s also bookended by glimpses into their experimental sensibilities. “Every Flower” starts off not with a signature blues shuffle, but with a chipper keyboard pattern that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Femcels song. The ending also introduces some shades of electronica; a sample of legendary bluegrass musician Alice Gerrard reflecting on mortality is laced with an ambient downtempo beat.
In a recent profile by Pitchfork, Hollywell stated that: “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”, gesturing towards the band’s unconventional hodgepodge of influences and former scenes. “Every Flower” exemplifies that intensely chameleonic unknowability, mixing and matching mutated forms of Americana as to capture a sound hitherto unknown. Twisted Teens have let themselves out of the jar.