Teens In Trouble’s Debut Album Walks a Well-Trodden Path to Mixed Results

When it comes to the title of the debut album Asheville’s Teens In Trouble, punctuation is important. A question mark changes everything. What am I owed? What belongs to me? What do I deserve? What is mine? For a singer and songwriter like Lizzie Killian, whose debut solo record comes almost a decade after the project’s humble beginnings, these kinds of questions might have reared their head early and often—and they might have come to define a project of uncertainty and doubt. And yet, there is no question mark at the end of What’s Mine. The title is not a request, nor a nervous inquiry or harbinger of defeat, but but a declaration; it is a burgeoning musician looking out at the world and deciding for herself what’s hers, without waiting for anyone else’s approval.

Killian might have started Teens In Trouble as a solo project back in 2015, but it wasn’t until 2022 that things started to heat up, when the band’s self-titled EP gaining significant traction among a crowd hungry for the hooky, anthemic punk rock that seems to roll off of Killian’s tongue. As such, it was no surprise to see the band sign with punk-rock lifer Mike Park and Asian Man Records—and it was even less surprising to see Killian and company ramp things up even further here on their debut record. On “Brave,” the band has such a preternatural control over the kind of quiet/loud dynamic that even its familiar moments pop in a way that continues to excite. Lines like “I don’t mean to be a pill but can I have some” could be too clever for their own good if they weren’t delivered with the conviction that Killian provides and an undercurrent of chunky riffs carrying the track home home.

As is often the case on one’s first album, What’s Mine wears its influence on its sleeve—going as far as equating music taste with love in a way we are probably all guilty of at one time or another. “If this is how to be close to you, I want to know what you are listening to,” Killian sings to a prospective lover on “Playlist.” It’s a testament to her raw talent that she is joined here by some of the very voices to which What’s Mine is often so clearly indebted. Both PUP’s Stefan Babcock and Jeff Rosenstock’s guitarist Mike Huguenor make appearances on the record, and they feel perfectly placed within its 2010’s punk rock pastiche.

There are times, though, when all this reverence leads to a woeful lack of specificity. Even the soaring choruses and memorable melodies of a song like “Awkward Girl” can’t save the banality at its core. Feeling out of place, ostracized and awkward are universal feelings—and Killian shares them in a way that is so broad that it completely shuns the distinction you need to make such a well-trodden idea interesting. It’s a trap she falls into more often than you’d like or expect, and it has a dulling effect on even the record’s best songs, putting a ceiling on the project as a whole.

That said, when Killian does lock in to something specific—as she does on “Autopilot”—you can see a clear way forward for Teens In Trouble. “This apathy is a parasite, it’s never going to get its hooks in me again,” she sings, among a coiled spark of guitars and an assaultive rhythm section. This may be one of a half-dozen rollicking anthems on What’s Mine, but it’s a highlight armed to the teeth with vibrancy and it separates itself from the pack—all to the credit of Killian, who is able to capture something we haven’t seen dozens of times before on it. Teens In Trouble may not need to question whether they fit in, but they still need to find a way to stand out.