Hotline TNT
Raspberry Moon
THIRD MAN
The brainchild of Will Anderson, Hotline TNT gained traction with his 2023 sophomore release Cartwheel, which earned him spots at major music festivals over the past two years as well as opening slots for Hippo Campus and Fleshwater on recent tours. Anderson’s penchant for catchy melodies, suspended chords, and shoegaze-influenced guitar effects became a winning combination, which was enhanced by the addition of touring members August Beetschen, Olivia Garner, Mike Ralston, and The Berries’ Matt Berry, who joined him on tour and ended up staying onboard to contribute to Hotline TNT’s latest record, Raspberry Moon.
Their debut as a full band pulls back on the noise-rock guitar of Cartwheel and replaces it with a stripped-down, folk-referencing sound tinged with melancholic guitar reminiscent of Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, and Alex G. Yet Anderson’s fondness for crunchy, shoegaze-styled riffs and experimentation largely sets him apart from those contemporaries—Raspberry Moon is predominantly neither drenched in reverb nor carefree jangle-rock. It’s an intriguing middle ground, a place where both genres coexist as one.
Even though these sonically opposing genres do sometimes clash, for the most part they’re almost paradoxically harmonious here, despite the added dissonance and feedback the band employs. Beneath the coating that these two dominating genres create, you can also distinguish other influences on these songs, like the psych-rock synths on “Transition Lens” and the krautrock-esque rhythms on “Break Right.” Anderson and company subtly incorporate these disparate sounds together, tweaking them with the right amount of novelty without them sounding too jarring
Raspberry Moon is an album that you can fade into—one track flows seamlessly into the next, like small pools connected by a river. The aforementioned synthesizer trip works much in this way, musically: “Transition Lens” smoothly drops you into the third track, “The Scene,” a song that was, funnily enough, the first track Anderson wrote for the record and therefore set the scene for Raspberry Moon. At the album’s midpoint, “Break Right” breaks from the shoegazy haze and plays with krautrock conventions—not typical backing for such saccharine lyrics, but this is what makes this album so interesting. Once you think you’ve figured them out, you’re thrown another curveball as to what the Hotline TNT project actually is.
