Don’t worry: This is not where Twisted Teens sell out. Though Holy Cross Tigers is the New Orleans duo’s first album for Sub Pop, it was made exactly the same way as their previous two breakthrough LPs from 2026. Founder Caspian would wake up in the morning, find a riff he loved, add some drums in his cheapo home studio, and stir RJ “The Razor” Santos so he could bleed some steel guitar across these tracks. Indeed, the only thing that is different about these 13 cuts is that they are Caspian’s capsules of heartbreak, written and rendered while the ex-girlfriend who had been there the very moment Twisted Teens started two years earlier still lived with him. 

These songs are transmissions from the frontline of despair, then, from the woozy and magnetic blues of remember-how-good-we-had-it rocker “When We First Met” to the slurred barroom bust-up “I Spend My Time Crying.” There is a song against snitching (“Lock and Key”), a song about wasted flirtation and seeping wounds of the soul (“Stalks”), and a song about being shamed right out of love (“I Bring”). Two peripatetic self-governing punks whose work rips and gloriously reorders pages from rock’s past, Twisted Teens were already one of 2026’s coolest stories when they had released only two of the year’s best LPs. And now here they are with an even better third, Holy Cross Tigers, a ripe stash of strangely reassuring anthems for shouting down a hurt heart.