After touring relentlessly, enduring seemingly endless lineup shifts, Hotline TNT have become a linchpin of several interconnecting DIY scenes. Their audience has steadily ballooned, with their debut album Nineteen in Love becoming a coveted LP. Its follow-up 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.