Ground Control Touring

Will Anderson believes in true love — as both concept and catalyst, aspiration and inspiration. During his 34 years, the Hotline TNT founder and architect has found such love perhaps half-a-dozen times. Each instance has prompted some enormous swing of commitment, like a cross-country move or simply being honest about his budding attraction. It is a hopeful and vulnerable way to exist, a way to ensure maximum bruising during the fall of the breakup. And so far for Anderson, that is how it has always ended, whether the air has slowly seeped out of some once-full balloon or whether it has simply popped, those expanded feelings expelled in an instant.

This tension is the brain, blood, and beating heart of Cartwheel, the byproduct of Anderson’s decades-long quest to pin down the surging sound long in his head. But borne of real hurt and continued hope, lit by the flickering belief that just maybe things will sort themselves out, Cartwheel transcends those scene associations to become something greater—a classic encapsulation of youthful ardor, fading into adulthood’s grim acceptance. It is a beautiful, radical, and engrossing record about trying to find what most of us have not yet attained: fulfillment.

Anderson plays and sings nearly every note on Cartwheel himself. He recorded the bulk of these songs during two very different sessions: one with prolific art-pop-punk auteur Ian Teeple (Silicone Prairie), who pushed him to keep working on every idea, and one with bicoastal engineer Aron Kobayashi Rich (Momma), who encouraged him to get ideas down and keep moving forward. But Cartwheel itself is seamless, with notions of bedroom studio largesse and punk simplicity perfectly coiled inside Anderson’s catastrophic visions of true love.

Cartwheel is the band’s follow-up to Nineteen In Love, a record that’s influence has spread through fervent word-of-mouth these last couple of years. Hotline TNT toured relentlessly, enduring seemingly endless lineup shifts to become a linchpin of several interconnecting DIY scenes. Their audience steadily ballooned, with Nineteen in Love becoming a coveted LP.