Teenage Warhead Turned Political Dread Into One of the Rawest DIY Albums of the Year

Teenage Warhead doesn’t sound like an artist trying to chase perfection. If anything, the entire project exists because Elliot Emory Smith finally stopped waiting for it.

After years spent playing in bands and relying on other musicians to bring ideas to life, the Erie poet decided to abandon the idea that great art needs permission, polish, or technical mastery to matter. What emerged was Teenage Warhead, a wildly prolific DIY project built through self-created loops, rough-edged emotion, midi experimentation, and pure necessity. Since launching in late 2023, Smith has released an overwhelming amount of music independently, not because he’s chasing algorithms, but because the songs seem to arrive faster than he can contain them.

His latest album, Fascists, Go Home!, might be his most urgent statement yet.

At its core, the project is about refusing numbness during a time of political chaos, disinformation, and growing social exhaustion. Rather than offering escapism, Smith forces himself and the listener to sit directly inside the discomfort. The result is messy, anxious, angry, vulnerable, and deeply human. It doesn’t feel manufactured for streams or trends. It feels like someone documenting history in real time before it swallows everyone whole.

“Fascists, Go Home!” feels less like an album and more like a form of resistance. At what point did you realize this project needed to confront the political moment we’re living in directly?

I used to shy away from overtly political issues because it dates the material and potentially makes it less accessible outside of the political moment.

But as the TW project has evolved, it’s become a kind of songwriting journal. Even when it’s not overt, the songs are recording moments in time and thought and culture. This time, I was interested in creating something so specific that it IS dated, that it bears witness to a particular moment in history. I tried to incorporate the literal news into the lyrics of these songs. 

We all bear witness to our times. Someday, maybe someone will find these musical artifacts, and they will feel seen, and our particular moment in history will be seen and felt by that person. A boy can dream.

You mentioned spending years believing you needed “better musicians” around you to create something meaningful. What finally gave you the confidence to stop waiting and just make the music yourself?

The punk/diy ethos has always inspired me. Jonathan Richman has an amazing quote: “We have to learn to play with nothing, with our guitars broken, and it’s raining.” Or as Bob Dylan once said, “You can make a song with just one note.” At a certain point, I guess that sunk in finally. I guess my friends and bandmates in Paula and Gause made it sink in. Both incredible musicians in their own right, they taught me a lot about how to record, how to write and structure a song, and taught me the vocabulary to describe the tunes that were always popping up in my head. Once they equipped me with that, it was off to the races.

There’s something really human about the imperfections throughout the project. Did embracing those flaws become part of the album's emotional identity?

On this record, I wanted to contrast the synthetic textures of dance music with something more homemade and human in the voice and arrangements. For me, the human voice is always at the center. I like it when the synthetic can make the organic feel more organic, and vice versa.

It took me a long time to realize that the flaws and imperfections in a piece of art are what make it unique. The weird loose ends that don’t get tied up, the seams that are showing: these are the markers that identify the art as mine. Nobody makes mistakes the same way as I do. That’s part of the historical record, too. Art is imperfection in pursuit of perfection.

Many artists avoid political commentary because they’re afraid of backlash or losing listeners. Did you ever hesitate to make your stance this explicit?

I don’t worry about listeners. I’m pretty comfortable with not having any. I figure anybody who likes what I’m doing is probably on the same side, so to speak. I’m hopeful that if someone on the wrong side is open to listening, maybe they will see the human cost of this regime. I think anybody who reads the title of this album and sympathizes with the fascists can get fucked. I think it’s important for the people affected to know that there are those of us out here paying attention, keeping score, keeping history.

You describe yourself as a poet first. How does writing lyrics differ from writing poetry for you emotionally and creatively?

Lyrics must function as music first and last. Meaning is the tricky bit in the middle and arises from the rhythm and melody. The music tells me what I mean, not the other way around. Poetry is frankly a lot harder for me because the “music” has to come from the language itself, without any guardrails.

Literature feels more gate-keepy than music to me. Like I have no qualms about self-releasing my music into the ether, but I would never publish a blog... I don’t know, there’s something more direct and more exciting to me about putting an album up online than mailing out poems to literary magazines so that someday maybe I can publish a book. Even though streaming services are a trap, it still feels exciting to have my record up “next to” a record by Prince or The Smiths.

Releasing 9 albums, 8 EPs, and multiple singles independently in such a short time is honestly kind of insane. What drives that level of output?

It’s thrilling to create something. When the whole comes together as more than its respective parts, it’s one of the best feelings in the world. I don’t play shows really; I just keep chasing that feeling of creation. I also admire artists who never stop working. The Fall and Guided By Voices come to mind.

I write and record pretty much every day. A lot of the time, it feels like banging my head against the wall, but every few dozen ideas, there is something that gels. I worry sometimes that my high output is the result of low standards… but I think a more charitable analysis would be that the output is the result of that rigorous daily practice. The machine is always running, so to speak.

Donating all Bandcamp proceeds to the American Civil Liberties Union adds another layer of purpose to the release. Why was it important for the project to extend beyond just the music itself?

I didn’t want this album to be an empty gesture. Virtue signaling or some kind of hysterical ranting and raving. I wanted it to feel human and lived in. And I felt it needed to serve its purpose in as many ways as possible. To be honest, I am deeply ambivalent about it being on streaming platforms because the companies that own these platforms support ICE. That is fucked. At the same time, when you work on something so hard, you want it to connect with people. You want to meet people where they are to some degree. People listen to their music on streaming. Moral purity doesn’t do much good if nobody hears it. Of course, the algorithm is fucked too, but I wanted to put it up on the shelf with David Bowie and everybody just in case.