Hotline TNT • Disq • Cry Baby
Sat 10/12/24
8:30PM
18+
music
$16 ADV // $20 DOS
Show Lineup
Hotline TNT
(Brooklyn, NY)
Genre: Indie Rock, Rock, Shoegaze
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.
DISQ
(Madison, WI)
Genre: Indie, Jangle Pop, Pop, Power Pop
Disq have assembled a razor-sharp, teetering-on-the-edge-of-chaos melange of sounds, experiences, memories, and influences. Due out March 6 on Saddle Creek, Collector ought to be taken literally — it is a place to explore and catalog the Madison, Wisconsin band’s relationships to themselves, their pasts, and the world beyond the American Midwest as they careen from their teens into their 20s. This turbulence is back-dropped by gnarled power pop, anxious post-punk, warm psych-folk, and hectic, formless, tongue-in-cheek indie rock. Collector, like the band itself, is defined and tightly contoured by the ties between the five members. Raina Bock (bass/vocals) and Isaac DeBroux-Slone (guitar/vocals) have known each other from infancy, growing up, and into music together. Through gigging around Madison, they met and befriended Shannon Connor (guitar/keys), Logan Severson (guitar/backing vocals), and Brendan Manley (drums) — three equally dedicated and adventurous musicians committed to coaxing genre boundaries. Produced by Rob Schnapf, Collector is a set of songs largely pulled from each of the five members’ demo piles over the years. They’re organic representations of each moment in time, gathered together to tell a mixtape story of growing up in 21st century America. The songs are marked by urgency, introspection, tongue-in-cheek nihilism, and a shrewd understanding of pop and rock structures and their corollaries — as well as a keen desire to dialogue with and upset them.
Cry Baby
(NYC)
Genre: Alternative Rock, Electronic, Pop
Cry Baby is a Brooklyn based five piece embracing what it means to be a band. Writing and recording out of their bedroom studio, their sound is marked by the digital age of computers.Drawing inspiration from 90’s alt-rock acts like Third Eye Blind, they infuse modern production elements of drum breaks, synthesizers, and glitchy soundscapes. After the release of their first two singles in summer of 2023, they quickly began playing up and down the east coast. These electric and antics filled shows began cementing a name for Cry Baby as a standout band in the NYC scene.
“Bridging the brilliance of Y2K pop rock with the charge and charm of 2020s alternative, Cry Baby are well on their way to defining their own place – and filling a much-needed gap – in today’s music world” (Atwood Magazine).