Hotline TNT – Path of Totality

Will Anderson needed to call a timeout. It was October 2024, in the studio of modern D.I.Y. hero Amos Pitsch, clear across Wisconsin from the small town where Anderson was raised. As he has done for every increasingly absorbing Hotline TNT album, Anderson arrived at the studio with eight, maybe nine demos he liked, leaving himself room not only to expand their sound but to write a few tracks in the room, too. But this time, and for the first time, the quartet that had toured for the last 10 months as Hotline TNT had come with Anderson, somewhat unexpectedly. He had intended to make one more album his way—holing up with a producer and building songs piece by piece, as he’d done for the 2023 breakthrough Cartwheel—before making Hotline TNT a full-band affair in the future. But guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, and drummer Mike Ralston wanted in. Anderson relented.

 

As they cycled repeatedly through one of Anderson’s demos, they couldn’t unlock the way to play it, the power and pattern that Hunter’s and Anderson’s guitars needed to share. When Hunter began playing a part that had nothing to do with that song, Anderson dipped, heading upstairs with his guitar in a spell of mild pique and fatigue. When he emerged a few hours later, he’d written “The Scene,” a spiraling-and-stomping new song about wanting someone to throw a tantrum on your behalf. The rest of Hotline TNT, meanwhile, had written a lunging and moody instrumental, guitars pulled as tightly as razor wire against Motorik drums. Anderson resisted at first but then helped finish “Break Right.” Both songs are now tentpoles of Raspberry Moon, the most sweeping and compelling Hotline TNT album to date and, crucially, the first built by a full band. Oh, the other song they couldn’t get right? No one remembers its name.

 

That moment is but one element of the vulnerability and romance that funneled into Raspberry Moon, a generationally great statement of youthful wistfulness and very adult growth that also happens to be very charming and sometimes funny. Not only did Anderson cement his touring band in the studio, but he also wrote the most direct love songs of his life, winning testaments to a relationship that has seemed to change his perspective on sweetness, sincerity, life itself.

 

And when the quartet finished tracking with Pitsch, Anderson essentially handed him the tracks and asked him to play along, adding harmonies, keyboards, and percussion wherever he felt it worked. (Pitsch is credited as the fifth member here—so much for a solo project, huh?) Some of these 11 songs still deal with the sting of regret, of being left or leaving, as Hotline TNT always has. But this is a record animated by a sense of newness and possibility, of pushing back against the global sense that curtains are closing to make room in your own life for new friends. It is perfect music for looking forward, no matter how fucked the past may feel.