The seemingly halcyon Nineties are sounding better than ever in 2025 — Fugazi-fathered hardcore, Liz Phair feminist-pop plainspeak, and in the able hands of Hotline TNT, steaming slabs of guitar noise, Dinosaur Jr. via Teenage Fanclub circa “Everything Flows” buoyed by oceanic waves of Cocteau Twins modulations. It’s enough to make you miss the first Bush administration.
Will Anderson — born in 1989, the year Bush was sworn in — was but a tiny hood rat coming up in Minnesota’s Twin Cities then, but he caught the sonic vibe. And he’s got that low-key wistful Midwestern thing in his music, with a profound tunefulness: His folks raised him on harmony-rich Jayhawks LPs, and you know he listened hard to Hüsker Dü’s post-hardcore albums. Now a 21st century boy in Brooklyn, Anderson concocted Hotline as a one-man-show initially, with rotating collaborators pulling off random pop-up generator gigs. Now, evidently, dude’s let his guard down and pledged to a band — which is probably good for him. For us too, from the sound of Raspberry Moon, the crew’s in-bloom debut with the determined rock farmers of Third Man Records, which builds on Hotline’s excellent 2023 album, Cartwheel.
“I’ll take a friend/I’ll take a driving lesson,” he declares on the soaring “Letter to Heaven,” with drolly heartbreaking earnestness, ready to hit the road. “I’d make a bet we can fit in the van/I think we’d make it in/I’d make a joke and hope that it lands.” The lyrics can lean elliptical. “Julia’s War,” the magnificent lead single, peaks with Anderson’s wistful reflections on, I dunno, a poignant Scrabble game? (“Mark the score/Swap out the tiles/I won’t make you change your style.”) The goofy video furthers the team-building theme — rock band bootcampers running relay drills around Big Muff guitar pedals and doing chin-up reps on giant whammy-bars.
But by “Lawnmower,” against a buzzy backdrop of summer cicadas, Anderson’s tangled in blue and 12-string acoustic guitar strums, evidently back home where there are actual lawns to mow, turning inward is easier, and grown-up achievements appear smaller in the rearview. With a title nodding perhaps to hometown hero Prince, Raspberry Moon is 30 near-perfect minutes of shoegaze, with eyes peeking up at the horizon. “In the zone/Locked phone/Dirty tone/In my headphones,” Anderson rhymes blissfully near the end — a cozy place to be but, I bet he’d concede, even better with friends.
