Twisted Teens
Florida Water Blues
91点相当 Paste
78点相当 Pitchfork
今年、二枚目
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.”)