Raspberry Moon

Albums of the Year 2025: #18

Hotline TNT return with their third album Raspberry Moon, via Third Man Records. The follow-up to Cartwheel, the band’s “exquisite” (Billboard) 2023 breakthrough, Raspberry Moon is the most sweeping and compelling Hotline TNT album to date and, crucially, the first built by a full band.

Funneled into the album are moments of vulnerability and romance, creating a generationally great statement of youthful wistfulness and very adult growth that also happens to be very charming and sometimes funny. While in the studio of modern D.I.Y. hero Amos Pitsch (Tenement), Anderson found himself in an unusual position. 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 Cartwheel—before making Hotline TNT a full-band affair in the future. But there was no avoiding it.

Guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, and drummer Mike Ralston wanted in. Anderson relented. In making Raspberry Moon, Anderson confronted a burgeoning if occasionally difficult belief: Hotline TNT was now a band, and this was the band. The benefits are self-evident—it is the most texturally rich and energetically nuanced album Hotline TNT has ever made—from start to middle to finish.

Some of these 11 songs 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 messed up the past may feel. Lead single “Julia’s War” is an anthem of nascent affection where a simple and wordless chorus of “na na na nah” paints a horizon of possibility.

The guitars are perfectly warm and sharp, cutting into you but simultaneously pulling you into the song. Of the track, whose title is a hat tip to regional contemporary They Are Gutting A Body of Water’s sprawling imprint, Anderson says: “In a world of half-hearted hooks, and buried-in-the-mix vocals, we had to muster the courage to do what the rest of the shoegaze community could not… We looked out to the stadium and reassured the audience: Our voices, together, will be heard. You've never heard a TNT chorus this straightforward - when we stress-tested it during the writing process, the ‘try not to sing along challenge’ came back with a 100% fail rate.”

Musical auteurs have been a feature of rock ’n’ roll since its very early days—folks who could imagine a sound and the path to it, largely alone. Something akin to Moore’s Law has made it easier to become exactly that during the subsequent decades, since studios with solid gear are now as accessible as a bedroom. It is increasingly convenient to be solo. The real work, though, is to abandon the ego and singular devotion to your absolute vision and make something better with the people you trust. Hotline TNT has done exactly that on Raspberry Moon, an album where Will Anderson gives himself space to fall in love with the world around him and sing as much in songs so loaded with hooks you’ll need to choose which ones to hum at any given moment.