Every month, Consequence highlights a rising artist with our recurring feature series CoSign. For June 2025, we’re highlighting fuzz rockers Hotline TNT and their great third album, Raspberry Moon.
While his band Hotline TNT finished tracking a new song, Will Anderson took a walk around the rural Wisconsin neighborhood in which they found themselves recording. He mulled over some lyrics about the closing of a relationship, the finality of parting ways and the quiet that sets in afterwards. “Things get slower/ Get back to town/ Start the lawnmower/ Set me down,” he wrote, the image of cutting grass and resuming everyday tasks acting as a surreal foil to Anderson’s heartache.
He returned to the studio, tracked vocals, and completed “Lawnmower” that day. According to Anderson, this is the moment where everything clicked. “Hearing it for the first time, I finally thought, ‘All right, I think we got something special here,’” he reflects. It was one moment of purity that epitomized the process of crafting Raspberry Moon, Hotline TNT’s outstanding third album, arriving on June 20th via Third Man Records.
“Lawnmower” may be the penultimate song on Raspberry Moon, but it boasts a kind of poignant lucidity and wistful attitude that characterizes the whole album. Gone are Hotline TNT’s days of overblown DIY shoegaze and scrappy indie rock; whatever mess that remains in their sound has crystallized into shimmering, hot-blooded guitars, organic drum sounds, and patient, majestic songwriting. Across 11 tracks, Hotline TNT follow-up their excellent 2023 effort Cartwheel with similarly animated offerings, this time embracing a more romantic and clarity-driven sound.
But beyond the more hi-fi production (courtesy of midwest DIY hero Amos Pitsch and Anderson himself), Raspberry Moon is a testament to Anderson’s willingness to let go, personally and artistically. He’s found his sweet spot, striking a balance between following his intuition and simply letting things be.
That meant embracing a more collaborative, full-band recording process, involving guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, and drummer Mike Ralston earlier and more often. “The process still kind of started the same — me making demos in GarageBand and my four track, then opening that up to varying degrees,” Anderson tells Consequence over Zoom. “Some songs, like ‘Candle,’ were pretty much start-to-finish just me. But other songs were completely written as a four piece in the studio together; completely collaborative songs like ‘Break Right’ and ‘The Scene.’”
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