Hotline TNT – Cartwheel | Album Review

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Third Man Records

I was 20 years old when I first found out about Weed… The band, not the substance.

I used to hang out at the record store where I currently work when- one day, a used copy of Running Back by Weed came in. When Dollhands (now Clearbody) put out our first EP, the label that pressed tapes for us compared our music to Weed, but I thought it was just a joke and not an actual band. As soon as this record was staring me in the face, I knew I had to buy it without a second thought. Sure enough, I got home, threw Running Back on my record player, and it changed my outlook on music forever. I had never heard anything like this collection of songs; I had found my first holy grail of a record. 

I think Will Anderson understands that feeling more than most people in bands do. Hotline TNT did an Audiotree Far Out back in 2019, this was my first exposure to the group. Having already spent countless hours with Weed’s KEXP session, I quickly realized that this was Will’s new band, and needless to say, I was an instant fan. The first thing I did after watching that Audiotree was open up Spotify and type in Hotline TNT- to my surprise, nothing showed up. I then searched YouTube and found out that the only way to get these songs was to download them through a Mediafire link in the description of Fireman’s Carry. Back then, the only way to hear Hotline TNT was through YouTube, vinyl, or this janky Mediafire link. I grew up torrenting on Limewire, so this wasn’t a foreign process to me, in fact, it felt special like I was the only person that had this on their phone. 

All this to say, I’ve been closely watching the metamorphosis of this band, and Cartwheel feels like a victory lap after the longest possible NASCAR race of all time. The band is firing on all cylinders here, and with a bare-bones 33-minute runtime, not a moment is wasted. This record blends the perfect mix of cool style, cuteness, and loud-ass fuckin guitars. The textures of guitar tone are unlike anything I’ve heard in any other album, 100 other bands could try all the studio wizardry in the world and not achieve sounds like these. At its core, the tone sounds like it’s being built with an acoustic guitar, but it’s fuzzed out to the max. I especially love the color the 12-string adds on “Stump,” the record’s heartfelt closer. 

Cartwheel starts with the first two singles, “Protocol” and “I Thought You’d Change.” I was lucky enough to first hear “Protocol” last year when I saw Hotline open for Snail Mail and Momma. The song blew my mind then, and it somehow still does every time I hear it. My favorite track on the record is “Spot Me 100,” the way Will starts the song with “Squad car, caught you on the Autobahn” really does something for me. The lyrics are buried underneath all the layers of guitar, as God intended, but when one slips through the wall, it sticks with you for the rest of the runtime.

When you break down all the songs on this record, it’s the old man’s definition of Shoegaze, simply pop songs that are played deafeningly loud. Personally, I love how skewed the meaning of shoegaze has become; the genre can truly be whatever the artist (or the listener) wants it to be. Some people will call this a lo-fi record, maybe even just a rock record, but to me, this is the closest anyone has gotten to making our generation’s Loveless. Cartwheel is easily my favorite record that’s come out this year, even the interlude track is a contender for one of the best songs this year. 

After being a fan for so long, this LP exceeded my already high expectations. Cartwheel is a career-defining album for Hotline TNT. I love seeing this band win, I love it whenever I go to their Spotify page and see those monthlies go up. They’ve been grinding for years at this point and have been playing the game their way, and it’s really inspiring for someone like me to see that you can do it YOUR way. Being in a band is hard work, it took me the better part of two years to write songs for my band’s last release, so I can hear all the love and hard work that went into Cartwheel. I often think about how we’ll view records 20 years down the road; the process of putting out an album is so quick, and sometimes it feels like people forget about music a week after its release, but this is not one of those records. Even though it’s only a few weeks old at this point, it’s clear that Cartwheel will easily be a touchstone of this era of music.

My name is Eric Smeal, and I play in a band called Clearbody. We put out a record called Bend Into a Blur earlier this year, and I’m very proud of it. We play shows and tour sometimes, but right now, I’m just out here living life, writing our next record, working my day job, taking photos, etc. My handle everywhere is @amplifierwrship, thanks for reading!

Puppy Angst: One Year of Scorpio Season

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Dreamy, gazey Philadelphia rockers Puppy Angst celebrated one year of their debut LP Scorpio Season, hitting the road on an East Coast tour and releasing a vinyl edition to commemorate the occasion. Swim Into The Sound spoke with lead vocalist Alyssa Milman as they looked back on the genesis, recording, and touring of this creative and impressive contribution to indie rock. 

Milman was a founding member of bands Blushed and Past Life and has played as a touring member of Kississippi. They noted that touring with Kississippi and other bands has been a deeply generative experience, which helped shape and focus their sights on their own musical projects. 

“As of April 2022, Puppy Angst is my only band. It’s why I left Kississippi. Having those experiences on the stage as we played… definitely shaped me as a musician, in the sense that it taught me what tour was really like,” said Milman. “It was a whirlwind and definitely changed things for me. I had never played on a stage that big. It just [gave] me a bit of a hunger to have this band get to do that stuff, too.”

Puppy Angst is a rollicking rock outfit suffused with youthful energy and tenderness, nurturing both brashness and vulnerability. Milman described the sound as “like if Mannequin Pussy or Bully was a shoegaze band.” To my ear, it also recalls glam rock and pop-punk while being something entirely original.

The band’s grounding in the Philadelphia rock ecosystem is one of Puppy Angst’s great strengths. Every member in the band besides Milman is in other projects; drummer Eric Naroden is the frontman of In Lieu of Roses, synth player Pauli Mia is the frontwoman of Twin Princess, and bassist John Heywood tours with indie superstar Alex G. Guitarist Dan Leinweber played alongside Milman in Blushed, and makes ambient music under the name greenspace. “It is cool to have this intricate web,” said Milman. “A band family. Bands-in-law, as [synth player] Pauli would say.”

For Scorpio Season, Puppy Angst’s debut album, the creative process was a mix of gradual cultivation and rapid finalization. The songs were written slowly, starting in 2019 and continuing over the next three years. Lead single “Yellow Paint,” a catchy and dynamic song, which offers an early high point on the album. The revving guitars deliver energy and strength, while the warbling synths add a layer of gauzy beauty and complexity.

“‘Yellow Paint,’ as soon as I wrote it, I was like “this is the one. This is the greatest song I’ve ever written!” Milman adds, “It was one of those moments where I was like “I can’t believe I wrote that.”

Writing the album was as much a process of transmogrifying old songs as it was coming up with new material; some of the songs, like “Aftermath,” had been reworked from early versions performed with previous bands.

“‘Aftermath’ was a really fast [song], it fit the Blushed world of the surf punk, super quick, chaotic type of thing, which we do a lot of in Puppy Angst! But something about it felt wrong to just take the song that Blushed wrote and record it verbatim on our album,” said Milman. “To record it, I wanted it to be a new song while still honoring some of that old song, like put it into the Puppy Angst world while also not taking too much from what Blushed did in the past.”

In contrast to the slow and intricate writing process, recording was done in a flash, with the band eager to finish the record in time for an (on-brand) Scorpio season release. “We went into Headroom Studios, just me, John, and Eric. We got all the drums and bass done in a day and a half,” said Milman. 

Additional recording took place in the home studio of the sound engineer Joanna Baumann with the help of Dan Leinweber while Milman left for tour with Kississippi. “I was worried I just wouldn’t have the time or the creative energy to write all these guitar parts for an album, but I knew I wanted to have the bottom layers on it, to make it really textural, really lush,” said Milman.

“We finished mixing it in the summer of 2022 and put it out on October 24, 2022. So it was a long-winded process, but in the end, it was really quick,” said Milman. “I wanted it to be called Scorpio Season, I’d had this plan for so long… I wanted it to be for the fall and winter, I wanted it to match the season it came out in.”

The album indeed carries a punchy melancholy that feels appropriate for the autumn months; the album is colored with themes of both decay and renewal, a certain bitterness and pain, and is tempered with perspective and reflection. Even the songs that are by no means soft carry an unshakable vulnerability; on “Your Bones,” Milman sings, “I would’ve comforted you, I would’ve comforted you, but… you would never do the same.” The strong doses of anguish and abandon make the record feel at home in the darkest months of the year.

After the album’s release, the band embarked on an extensive tour, playing everything from college radio shows to two official showcases as South By Southwest.

“Our two official showcases were so, so much better than I ever could have imagined. Packed rooms! It was bizarre!” recounts Milman. “There were shows where the venue staff and bartenders were buying our merch. I was like, ‘You guys see so many bands! It’s so wild you would want to buy a tee shirt from us.’ That felt very affirming.”

The smaller shows were also memorable, with Milman noting that the younger audiences carry different (higher!) energy. “We played a really insane house show where Pauli was scared her beer was going to get knocked over by kids moshing,” Milman recalls, laughing.

Ultimately, the tour’s success has represented more than a good record; it represents a validation of individual and collective ambition, a deserved reward for Milman and the band’s dedication. In this way, Scorpio Season is a triumph, both personal and artistic.

“It’s been a really long process of realizing that I can put my own art, my creative pursuit first, it can be my first priority, and I can be all in on it,” said Milman. “Sometimes I feel like I’m making a fool out of myself. But then, on this tour, I was like, “No, the dream is happening! This is the dream.”

Elizabeth is a neuroscience researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice–on her substack handgun.substack.com. She is from Northern Nevada.

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain | Album Review

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4AD

I’ve often felt that it takes at least three listens for an album to truly imprint itself on my brain, but Buck Meek’s latest struck me with a stunning immediacy and an absorbency that was almost magnetic. Best known for being one-quarter of the Grammy-nominated Pitchfork-headlining indie band Big Thief, Meek has released two prior solo records, appeared in a Bob Dylan concert film, and also used to be married to Adrianne Lenker. From a life as full and complex as Meek’s, his prior solo work has been lovely and simple, but this has expanded considerably with Haunted Mountain.

Right from the beginning of the record, “Mood Ring” strikes the listener with something buzzy and complicated and new, a blurry melange of notes from guitars, maracas, and modular synthesizers. This track is fresh without being off-puttingly experimental; it bears almost no resemblance to the straightforward country-folk notes that composed his previous solo releases. “Cyclades” is another bright spot in the album’s progression, with electric guitars reminiscent of 60s power rock in both chord progression and instrumentation. (I scribbled “delectable” in my notes during my first listen.) “There are too many stories to remember / Too many stories to tell,” Meek sings, with the sonic richness of the music complementing the feeling of abundance. 

Meek soon returns to his mellow folk roots further in the record; the title track, “Haunted Mountain,” co-written with Jolie Holland, features glossy lap steel guitar and a square dance percussion. “Lullabies” dips into the American folk classic “You Are My Sunshine” to touching effect. Meek strikes a delicate balance between rock and folk in “Undae Dunes.” This song features thumping percussion and a prominent bass romping behind the lap steel guitar; the composition feels crowded with influences and emotions. 

At moments, the jaunty folk-inflected rock reminded me of contemporaries like MJ Lenderman and Wednesday, but without the restlessness and brashness that grants energy and power to the newcomers’ work. Meek’s music is reflective, dealing with themes of soulfulness and travel rather than Formula One racing and high-end butcher stores. It’s almost as though the newcomers to the country-rock scene (or bootgaze, or whatever you want to call it) are more grounded, while Buck Meek, although perhaps older and more worldly, seems to have less of a sense of self.

The album ends with an unusual collaboration of sorts; Meek was given the opportunity to finish a song by the Christian songwriter Judee Sill, who died in 1979, eight years before Meek was born. “The Rainbow,” with lyrics written three weeks before Sill’s death, is a partnership that crosses generations and folk styles to arrive, gauzelike, in our ears. I have complicated feelings about this song; it sounds vaguely like Sill, with slight seventies folk sensibilities; it sounds more like an influence and less like a replica. Whether or not it matches up with Sill’s intentions for the piece is unknowable. Meek stated that his intention with this song was to act as a “vessel” for the late Sill, and this is a staggeringly difficult role for any musician to play, technically and ethically. Yet what I hear is fundamentally a Buck Meek song, and to include it as the album’s closer is an extremely bold move.

In parsing this record for weakness, I could find only the unfortunate fact of the voice. Buck Meek is an extraordinary instrumentalist, but he is markedly less extraordinary of a singer. His voice has a smallness to it, a reedy and almost nasal quality, which leaves the instruments to fill the space where stronger vocals might be in other artists’ songs. I like his previous solo work a tremendous amount, which largely consists of him singing alongside a single guitar; the simplicity works for his voice there in a way that the more complex formulations fail to do. The upward-tilting vocals also make these songs feel exceedingly wistful, almost like children’s music. The overall effect is saccharine and goopy, with all the sincerity of a Big Thief song but none of the elegance.

That being said, this record is a remarkable and sometimes enjoyable foray, a valuable addition to the rapidly growing catalog of American country-rock music. There is a certain looseness in the production that befits the impromptu jam-like feeling that suffuses this record. This record reminds me of a family, commenting on love in all its complicated, imperfect, myriad forms.

Elizabeth is a neuroscience researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice–on her substack handgun.substack.com. She is from Northern Nevada.

Crooks & Nannies – Real Life | Album Review

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Grand Jury Music

​​Is this real life? It feels really bad sometimes.

Max Rafter and Sam Huntington, better known as Crooks & Nannies, are here to ask the questions that have been on all of our minds the last few years. The duo met in High School and began making music together (formerly as The Original Crooks and Nannies) before seemingly taking time off after their 2016 release Ugly Laugh. Seven years and a handful of singles later, they’ve returned with Real Life, an innovative and haunting record chronicling the beauty and horror of coming to understand yourself. 

Real Life begins with chirping bugs and the hum of outside, starting the Huntington-led “N95,” an evocative song about losing a loved one to illness and wanting them to know who you really are before it’s too late. Her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in early 2020, just days after she started hormone therapy. After his passing, the duo started writing the songs for Real Life in the cabin he had been building before his diagnosis. 

The cabin itself is woven into the record–from beginning to end, you feel as though you’re sitting on the porch with a friend, trading cigarettes and stories from the past few years of your life. The brilliance of “N95” is in its simplicity. It only takes two verses to completely crush you: “I tell you I’m a woman while you sit with the dog / On the bed in the room where I put on the bras / Cause you die in a week either way / So I won’t wait.” Sonically, it feels like a spaceship slowly starting up, abducting you into the world of Crooks & Nannies, before drowning you in a final chorus of the word “wait” that stretches on for nearly a minute.

The contrast between the duo’s songwriting is a great strength throughout Real Life, and the second track- lead single and Max Rafter-led “Temper”- features some of their best lyrics like “giving gives pleasure, but it means I gotta work a little harder / power gives pleasure easily” and “it doesn’t have to meet my every need / a seagull in a parking lot still eats.” Musically, it’s a song that could easily be straightforward, but Crooks & Nannies pepper in growling background vocals, buried screams, and guitars that burn through you like lasers before ending as abruptly as it began. 

“Cold Hands,” one of my favorite tracks from the record, features Huntington singing about someone who has supported her through indecision and uncertainty. Crooks & Nannies are adept at painting a picture with sound instead of lyrics. When Huntington sings, “It's flooding in the b a s e m e n t,” the way it’s sung physically takes you down to the basement and makes you feel like you’re drowning there with all her things. Another thing they do incredibly well is creating dynamic moments, making full use of their range. “Cold Hands” is a song that starts and remains mostly soft-spoken- until the end when it erupts in booming swell bass, stinging guitars, and record scratches. Yes, record scratches. And it works incredibly well. 

On “Big Mouth Bass,” Rafter sings about the unique bond of a friendship with someone who understands you. Breaking plates and laughing together. The song feels like sitting in the grass on a warm day and teeters back and forth from soft country to Motion-City-Soundtrack-esqe synths. Some of the song's best moments are the contrast between the huge, layered guitars and vocals before cutting to just an acoustic guitar and Rafter’s twang-tinged voice. 

The undeniable centerpiece of the record is “Growing Pains,” a song that speaks on the struggles of transitioning and coming to terms with who you are. With lyrics like “I hurt myself bad without blinking and wanna know why that’s a thing that I do,” Huntington is digging all the bad parts from inside herself and presenting them to you, the listener. The fear of hurting those closer to you without meaning to is universal, and “Growing Pains” nails that feeling before ultimately ending on a positive note: “I don’t wanna die / I wanna do something right.” The vocal effects when she sings “I’m moving through space and time” sonically align you with the lyrics, making you feel like you’re moving with them. Similarly, there’s a persistent “tick and tick and tick and tick” of time in the aforementioned “Big Mouth Bass.”

“Country Bar” and “The Gift” are the next two Rafter-led tracks, the former about taking apart a relationship like a mechanical bull before piecing it back together and attempting to make everything fit, while the latter is possibly exhuming the end of a relationship. Both songs are heartwarming and insightful windows into the struggle that comes with these seismic changes in a partnership. “The Gift” features some of Sam Huntington’s most intricate drum work and more poignant lyrics from Rafter - “I touched the pan / yeah I knew it was hot / so why’d I touch it? / being carefully cruel to the things that you love is still careless.”

Track eight, “Immaculate,” begins with the screeching and creaking of violins, creating an eerie horror movie-like vibe at the start of the track that permeates the whole song. Another high point of the record; the lyrics reference Rafter’s struggle with alcohol. The ending will stop you in your tracks as all the music cuts out, leaving just Max’s voice along with a pitched-down backup singing:

I won’t have another drink
cause I don’t wanna be that guy anymore
but it hurts to sit and think
I think I better take a walk

The record ends with “Weather” and “Nice Night.” While “Weather” was written over the course of a nighttime bike ride by Huntington, “Nice Night” feels like the return from that bike ride and places us back on the porch of the cabin where we began the record. Musically, “Weather” leans into the band’s darker side, constantly wondering if we who are makes us bad. The heavy, slamming guitars reflect that inner conflict as Huntington sings, “I’m fucking not playing, don’t leave me alone / I don’t wanna find out what I’m capable of” before cutting out to a good 15 seconds or so of silence, giving us time to think about what we just heard. Silence is something Crooks & Nannies use throughout their record to great success. In my opinion, the silence they leave us with is just as important as their music. “Nice Night” harkens back to the theme of friendship, rounding out the record with a beautiful, drifting saxophone and Rafter accepting the horrors of being truly understood. 

Crooks & Nannies have created something incredible with Real Life that already feels like it will stand the test of time. It’s one of those rare records that lingers in your mind, beckoning you to come back over and over again until you can fully understand all of its inner and outer workings. It’s the friend you return to while the strobe of the porch flickers on and off, so bright with raw truth and talent that you have to shield your eyes. It’s an honest reflection of who we are, the good and the bad, that I will continue to return to no matter how much it hurts to hear. Like a moth to the light. 

My name is Alex, and I make music as Birthday Dad! I released my debut album, The Hermit, last year and have vinyl available now from Refresh Records! Follow me on Twitter and everything else! @iambirthdaydad

Ratboys – The Window | Album Review

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Topshelf Records

There is a moment I love from Ratboys’ debut album AOID, on their song “Charles Berenstein.” Amidst a song about love and confusion, the instrumentals suddenly switch to a waltzy three-four time signature for a measure or two, with an ascending bass line imbuing the piece with a bouncy and breezy, almost jazzy, feeling. It’s a bold move; a sudden musical change like this could feel abrupt and out of place, but Ratboys pulled it off, making it sound sealed and solid. I love this moment because it’s cool and makes me want to dance, but also because you can feel the whole group perfectly operating as a unit. 

For a band that has felt so coherent and solid from their debut, it is hard to imagine improvement. Yet Ratboys have continued to surpass themselves, with each record outdoing the last in style and emotive depth. The Window, their fifth and latest record, is the culmination of this stunning growth, with the band writing all songs together for the first time. It also marks the first time the band has recorded an album outside of Chicago, which struck me as curious since the record carries a quintessentially Chicago flavor, that specific jaunty and reckless strain of indie rock. Instead, the songs were recorded in Seattle with producer Chris Walla, known for his involvement in the band Death Cab for Cutie, who pushed the band to expand their repertoire while leaving the Chicago sound intact. Described by frontwoman Julia Steiner as a “dedicated and intentional process,” the songs were written and rehearsed for two years before seeing the light of production.

Right from the opening track, the composition and energy diverge from the rest of the band’s repertoire while maintaining the ethos of tenderness that has characterized their music from their earliest releases. Throughout the album, grungy, garage-rock-inflected motifs veer into power pop and country-folk territory, and the songs feature lyrics ranging from punchy and defiant to grim and reflective. The band even leans into goofy horror aesthetics in the record’s smash lead single “It’s Alive!” which continues the record’s window theme while also articulating a particular kind of American ennui: “I feel it all, frozen in my house / All around, it’s in the stars / It’s speeding towards the sign.” There is even a brief fiddle featured on “Morning Zoo,” showing the magic of their bold new songwriting experiments.

Lead single “Black Earth, WI,” is almost nine minutes in length and features a transcendental guitar solo that evokes a different time in rock and roll history when guitar solos were treated with a different kind of attention and reverence. More rollicking garage rock fun adorns “Crossed That Line” and “Empty,” with gutsy energy creating a noisy but endlessly danceable groove. The fuzzy guitars propel Steiner’s vocals to ethereal heights. The lyrics on these songs would feel snotty if they weren’t so confident: “Get it? I got it / It’s not what I wanted / it’s fucking dumb.” This young feeling of rebellion revived suffuses other songs, as in “No Way,” where Steiner sings, “I’ll take a penny for your thoughts, and I’ll throw it straight to hell / There’s no way you’ll control me again.”

The album’s title track carries a smashing rock effect, which belies the stunningly intimate lyrics about the death of Steiner’s grandmother in June of 2020. According to Steiner, protections from the COVID-19 pandemic dictated that the family had to say their goodbyes through an open window in her grandmother’s nursing home, unable to be physically close. Steiner notes that many of the lyrics in the song come from quotes her grandfather said to her grandmother through the window: “I need to tell you everything / before it’s too late / That I don’t regret a single day / And you’re so beautiful.” The song is so upbeat and catchy it is almost impossible to cry, striking an energetic tone amidst a reflection on grief and change.

Closing out the record, “Bad Reaction” is the final jewel in the crown. Following the diversely uptempo offerings of the other songs, “Bad Reaction” stands in partial contrast to the busy and ambitious sonic textures of the other songs, with poignant and spare composition. The quieter sound makes the sincerity of the song all the more meaningful and shows that Ratboys can do more than crash and crush. The emotions of the song feel achingly clear and present, to me at least, my heartstrings pulled as Steiner’s clear voice asks, “What’s the one thing you love / what’s the one thing you love / what’s the one thing you love now?” Although I have never driven a car fast in reverse, as Steiner sings, I feel a profound sense of relatability with the song, which carries a certain hallowed resonance I struggle to describe. Perhaps it is simply the keen pain of a singular longing. Either way, it captures the peculiarly unhappy feeling of being young and listless in America with a haunting specificity that also feels universal. 

Such a wide range of sounds and emotions could sound disjointed with any other band at the helm, but Ratboys manage to make it sound cohesive and solid, a confident execution of a bold artistic vision. The Window showcases a band’s growth and documents their lineage within a specific indie scene. They are at once omnivorous and ambitious, cheeky and contemplative, salty and sweet.

Elizabeth is a neuroscience researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice–on her substack handgun.substack.com. She is from Northern Nevada.