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Hotline TNT is helmed by Will Anderson (on the right), but the interplay between him and fellow guitarist Olivia Garner (second from right) has come to define the band’s massive, shoegaze-influenced wall of sound.

Photo by Wes Knoll

Will Anderson was teaching at a New York high school—until Jack White’s record label came knocking. Now, his band is shooting into the shoegaze stratosphere behind their second record, Cartwheel.

Hotline TNT singer and guitarist Will Anderson started writing songs as a way to work through personal relationships, so it’s no surprise that the New York band’s second LP, Cartwheel, encapsulates Anderson’s modern-day, bard-like quest for romance—for better and for worse—through heavy fuzz pedals, distorted guitars, and layered sonic textures that cascade over propulsive rhythms. Slick engineering from punk artist Ian Teeple and Aron Kobayashi Ritch lift the record into the sweeping shoegaze stratosphere, that bottomless niche of music where heartbreak and mammoth, verbed-out riffs cry on each other’s shoulders.

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