“When I moved to Minneapolis, I really thought I wasn’t going to play music anymore,” Anderson confessed.
Instead, he started Hotline TNT as a home-recording project. By the time he moved to New York in 2019 — where he intended to go to a work as a school counselor — he had also gotten more serious about TNT. As pandemic restrictions eased, the group starting playing out live and landed the deal with Third Man to release its second album, “Cartwheel.”
An elaborate and alluring blend of cranked-up, fuzzed-out guitars and softer, tender power-pop melodies, “Cartwheel” belied the lo-fi recording techniques behind it and wound up being named one of the best albums of 2023 by such influential music blogs as Pitchfork, Paste and Stereogum.
Many of the writeups on Hotline TNT have called it a shoegaze band, a term that Anderson sounded neither eager or embarrassed to accept.
“My understanding and interest in shoegaze music pretty much starts and ends with one band: My Bloody Valentine,” he said.
“The name of the genre itself is about the gear, a bunch of guitar nerds staring at their feet, which I’ve never really had any interest in,” he said. “I still haven’t really learned a lot of the technical stuff. I like to keep it as simple as I can. To me, it’s just basically about making loud, distorted guitar music with pretty melodies. I really haven’t put too much thought into it besides that.”