Indiecast - New Music From Haim And Hotline TNT

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Steven and Ian open this week's episode by hashing out the new trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the upcoming film about the making of Nebraska starring Jeremy Allen White from The Bear. Does the movie look any good? Does Jeremy have the proper level of rasp? (1:19) The guys also talk about a (terrible) new song featuring three sons of The Beatles. (10:13) Then, after Steven officially concedes defeat in the latest Fantasy Albums Draft (15:43), they review new albums by Haim (18:18) and Hotline TNT (33:40).In the mailbag, they contemplate the AI versions of themselves as determined by ChatGPT (43:08). In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks about the rave-inspired Real Lies and Steven goes for the Kentucky songwriter S.G. Goodman. (50:25)New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 244 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [e-mail], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Indycast is presented by Uprox's indie mixtape. Hello everyone and welcome to Indycast. On this show we talk about the biggest indie news of the week. We review albums and we hash out trends. In this episode, we review new albums by Heim and Hotline TNT. My name is Stephen Hayden and I'm joined by my friend and co-host. When he was a boy, he had a hole in the floor of his bedroom. Ian Cohen.

Ian, how are you? Yeah, I had that and all I did was just write like really crappy, smashing pumpkins-esque songs. on an acoustic guitar. I didn't get a Nebraska out of that, man. What a rip-off. You're a repair man. You're going to repair the hole in the floor and then the hole in yourself.

That's so not true because right before we started recording, I told Steve about like the three different repair people who are coming to my house like within the next two days. I can't do I can't do anything by myself. Just even getting this mic set up on this laptop was a Herculean effort. when Ian was a grown-up, he had a broken toaster in his kitchen. The broken toaster is a symbol of our national... Oh, we'll forget it. No.

So if you haven't seen this, there was a trailer released this week for the new Bruce Springsteen biopic about the making of Nebraska. It's now called Springsteen, deliver me from nowhere. It used to be called Just Deliver Me from Nowhere, based on the book by Warren Zanes. that came out a few years ago. My presumption is that the studio is a little bit nervous about whether people are going to see this title and know that it's a movie about Bruce Springsteen. So it's like, let's just put Bruce's name in the title of the movie.

I saw someone tweet that this change in title is going to affect the Oscar chances of this movie, that people aren't going to want to vote for a movie called Springsteen, colon, deliver me from nowhere. I don't know if that's true or not. It does feel a little cheesy. Yeah.

Like maybe, but maybe it means that, okay, Springsteen delivered me from nowhere. If this movie does well, we'll have Springsteen Tunnel of Love. Or Springsteen, the making of Lucky Town. Yeah, we need the Springsteen extended universe, you know, like Clarence Clemens things. Also, I'm loving the idea of changing the punctuation.

in this like Lionel Hutt style where it's like Springsteen comma deliver me from nowhere, which is a completely different vibe. That's true. It'd be like you'd be asking Springsteen to deliver you from nowhere. The trailer, which I'm just going to say, like I've already talked about this trailer for like 40 minutes on my other podcast, which is called Neverending Stories, by the way. It's about Bob Dylan normally, but we did a 40-minute emergency episode. on like a two-minute trailer.

It was insane how long we talked about this. But, yeah, I have a natural suspicion of musician biopics, and I remember, like, when the first trailer for the Dillon movie came out, I thought the first trailer was pretty bad. Like, the subsequent trailers were better, and I thought the movie was pretty good. But the first trailer was bad. I really love this trailer.

I'm not even going to front here. I can make my jokes, you know, like, it's based around this monologue that Jeremy Strong from Secession, he plays John Landau in the film. John Landau, of course, is Springsteen's manager and his producer throughout the 70s and 80s. And there's this monologue that Jeremy Strong is giving about how when Bruce was a boy, there was a hole in the floor of his bedroom, and he is trying to fix the hole. I guess not literally, but like figuratively and he's also going to fix the hole in America.

And like, I saw people making fun of this online and they were like typing out all the words in the monologue and if you look at them on paper, like it does look pretty silly. But hearing Jeremy Strong deliver that and you have like the title track from Nebraska playing in the background that like harmonica part. I'm going to make a confession. I might have gotten choked up

once or twice. I've watched this trailer about seven, eight times. Might have gotten choked up a couple times. I don't know if I'm just like a total sap here, Ian, if I'm just like a mark. But the trailer worked for me. And at the end, they showed Jeremy Ellen White on stage singing Born to Run.

And I think that's him singing. If it is him singing, it's a remarkable impression of Bruce Springsteen. Because he's doing like the full-throated arena rock Bruce. He's not doing like the, I'm in a bedroom playing, you know, use cars. Like, which I could see that being easier to sing, relatively speaking. But doing the full-throated, born to run, he's got the rasp. You see his neck is bulging with veins in a Bruce-like fashion. If that's him singing, I think you got to give him the Oscar right now.

It was incredible. I think the first thing we got to determine going forward, because we're going to talk about this movie when it comes out. Is it biopic or biopic? It's not biopic. It's never, it's biopic because like biographical picture. Okay. Yeah. All right, cool.

Now that we got that settled and I do. Are you, are you on here saying biopic? I don't remember the last time I said it out loud. But like this is like the only play, like 95% of the words where I'm not sure if I had to pronounce it are reserved for. for this podcast. So we got to hash this out, really. Yeah, I do think it's a good casting. I mean, he doesn't really look like Bruce,

but when you watch The Bear, he's got the biceps, and that's really the, he was cast for biceps. Also, people are going to obviously mock this thing, but my comparison is, is this better than the season four trailer of the bear, which I was like yelling at the TV. It was so, like, I could not be less. excited for the big. I haven't seen it actually. It's yeah I think it's kind of going on like it's it damn there looks like Gray's anatomy at this point but yeah like you know Jerry,

jaw if we can call him jaw. Jeremy Allen White yes yes. He I mean it's not like Anthony Mackey playing Tupac and Notorious which to me is the epitome of like this guy looks nothing like the actual guy to the point where he has to like remind the camera, yo I'm Tupac. But um yeah And I don't know what John Dow looks like in real life. So that doesn't bother me. But he looks a lot like John Landau in that era. Gotcha. I think it's good casting with Jeremy Strong.

I mean, I think, you know, because I've seen people talk about, oh, Jeremy Ellen White doesn't look much like Bruce Springsteen. That doesn't bother me, really. I feel like in a movie like this, you have to nail the essence. And if you nail the essence as you're watching the movie, what they look like. I think matters less and less. Like if you're into the movie, you're not going to be nitpicking, oh, his hair is different,

or maybe he should throw a fake nose on this guy so he looks more like the person he's playing. Yeah. I mean, judging by the trailer, and again, it's like a two and a half minute trailer, which I've already way over-analyzed more than is probably healthy. But the impression I get from the trailer

is that he's playing Bruce as like another version of Karmie, basically. Like the character from the bear, where instead of it being like a brilliant chef who is troubled and has a bad childhood, now he's a brilliant rock star who's troubled and has a bad childhood. And I think it actually slots in pretty cleanly. Again, like when I look at him in that trailer and, you know, you got like, again, Jeremy Strong is John Landau. You have Stephen Graham, the great British character actor as Bruce's dad. Like those scenes in black and white where they show the dad and young Bruce.

like shadow boxing in his bedroom and then they have that like the part that choked me up in the trailer is when they show grown up Bruce walking up to his dad in the bar and like the brass cask playing in the background and it's like oh my god they got me man they got me with this movie um so yeah i think they couldn't drop this on father's day i mean oh my god they really missed their window they didn't want to cause like flooding from all the tears that would have been shed, all the man tears being shed at that time. So, yeah, I'm guardably optimistic. Again, I love clowning on biopics, but I'm clearly, there's clearly a part of me that's a sap

for this kind of thing. So I'm on board. Yeah. I love you like being like Kent Brockman with the Lisa Lionheart doll where he spent like 40 minutes talking about this supposedly trivial thing. And also I do agree when you said like it would be more interesting to do, like, a tunnel of love like montage where he's like going in and out of like bloomingdale's looking at bolo ties uh oh my god that would be a if if if this is successful that's our sequel we need that

yeah i mean tunnel of love movie got bruce in his garage studio playing since just being miserable like american beauty or whatever like he's wearing like he's got the bolot tie on you know i mean that is like the handsomest i think a man has ever been on the cover of tunnel of love. Like, that is, you know, the, if you want to aspire to, like, masculine beauty, it's Bruce in the bolotai and the cover of tunnel of love as far as I'm concerned. Speaking of biopics, this is down the road. I'm making a transition here to the Beatles here, our Beatles story here in the pre-banter block, because there's going to be four Beatles biopics coming out. I don't know if that's next year or in a few years. I mean, that, I think, will

the end of the biopic trend. When they make a Ringo biopic. Like, what are you going to do with Ringo? And it's Barry Kugan, I'm probably mispronouncing it, like this sort of angsty actor playing Ringo. I don't really get that casting.

My hope is that they just focus on Ringo in the 70s. Yes. Partying with like Harry Nielsen and Keith Moon and getting kicked out of nightclubs with John Lennon. But anyway, there was a song released this week

featuring three Beatles' sons. You got Zach Starkey, James McCartney, and he got Sean Lennon, and apparently they lost Danny Harrison's number. Yeah.

Danny Harrison's in the doghouse, apparently, with the beetle offspring. But the song is called Ripoff. And it's part of this band. It's like a super group that Zach Starkey, who's Ringo's kid, called Mantra Abba.

The Cosmos is the name of the band. And like, there's two dudes from the Happy Mondays in this band. Like, who else is in this band? So I, you initially, like, said in the outline, they were making an album. And then I looked it up. It's like, oh, it's this band called Mantra of the Mantra of the Cosmos. Either one. It's got.

Andy Bell's in there. Yeah, Andy Bell from Ride. And it is, I wish we had visual because there, there's a pitchfork article from 2023 that announces them. and it is like one of the most disturbing press photos I've ever seen. Like, Sean and Bez are two of the greatest drugdoers of the past 40 years. And the fact that they're alive is shocking. And Zach Starkey, like, I don't know what I pictured in my mind of this guy looking like.

Maybe I got to confuse with Spencer Tweedy and I expect him to be younger or at least look more like Jason Bonham. I thought he was David Lee Roth. No. He is way more. hair than Roth at this point. Roth is pretty bald. I mean, I think Zach Starkey's in his late 50s. Yeah.

Because Ringo is 83 or, you know, thereabouts. So, you know, and he had this, you know, he had his kid in like the early 70s. So he's getting up there. I guess it'd be like late 60s at this point. I've got a, so this song is terrible, by the way. Rip off his name of the song. It's awful. It's the, it's this.

I guess, like, sub-Sargeant Pepper sounding song, it's like a psychedelic exploration of sound, which when I was playing it, I had a tab open playing this song. I felt like this song lasted like for 15 minutes. It just went on forever. And with no discernible structure or melody or anything, I couldn't really tell, like, where the Beatle kids were showing up.

I could sort of recognize Sean Lennon's voice, but I don't really know what James McCartney sounds like. I'm just picturing, you know, Paul McCartney, but 35% worse. Yeah. And their first song, but you got to listen to the first song they may call Gorilla, guerrilla, like spelled the G. It's like, it's even worse than this song that we're talking about right now. It's like one of the worst things I've heard in the last five years.

You know, it's weird. Like if your dad was in the Beatles, you know, why would you? you even make records? Why even put yourself through that? I mean, I will say Sean Lennon, his record from 98 into the sun, is an album I really loved in college, and it's a record that I would maybe consider putting in the Indycast Hall of Fame if Sean Lennon wasn't such a terrible poster. Yeah. I feel like his tweets have really detracted from my enjoyment of his music. I think that's actually a pretty good record, like a really good kind of California, like L.A. Indie pop record.

Yeah, we used to get, they used to play that all the time when I worked in the gap in 1998. That was like very much part of the, I think we've talked about this on the, on the pod before, like the DreamWorks core kind of music. Like, you know, where it was like kind of trippy, but electronic, like, Eoles comes to mind, Brand Van 3000, which was also a massive gap, playlist king. Yeah, it was eclectic, had some like Basanova songs.

and then the single was like a Beatle-esque type rocker. Post-corner shop type music, you know. Yeah, it was a good record, though. I really liked that at the time. And Zach Starkey, I've got some love for just from him playing an oasis. He's like the best oasis drummer. I'm actually bummed because he's been in the news because he was in the Who and then he got fired from the Who and he got rehired and then he got fired again.

And he said in an interview that he didn't do the Oasis Tour that's coming up because he thought he was going to be in the Who. So it's a bummer because he's a good drummer, I think. But I guess he's going to focus now on, what's the name of this band again? Mantra of the Cosmos. Mantra of the Cosmos. Well, good luck to you, Zach, with that band. Are we prepared to call a rap on the fantasy draft for the second quarter here?

I saw that Little Sims got a 7.4 from Pitchfork, which is the outlier for her. I feel like her reviews have been uniformly very positive. But I don't think that affected your score very much. Nah, I dropped the two points. Like, I felt like maybe a seven or like a board six and a half might have gotten us into, you know, a reel down to the wire thing. But, you know, she's got an 87 right now. So I think we can call this a rap. Yeah.

I think this was, I don't know if this was the closest one we've had, but it's been very NBA finals-esque. A lot of ups and downs, like momentum shifts. It's been, we've been locked in this whole time. And I just, yeah, we got to, we're going to have to do a new draft soon. Yeah, I mean, there was that moment where I feel like I was up by six or seven. Oh, you were killing me for a minute, man. You were just like the, it was just like Nick's Pacers, man. Yeah.

Once you're up 20 or like, you know, the equivalent of six points in this, that's when I got to, that's when I hit the gas. I think it was like Pacers Thunder in what was that game? Was it game four? Like where the Pacers were up. Yeah. Big in the fourth quarter and they would have gone up three one. And then they lost it because I was up by six or seven and then I swear the next week. I was down by six or seven.

It was like a 12 or 14 point swing, which we've never had on the show before. It was really like the stateside critics came through for Will Sims in a big way. It's kind of surprising. I would have thought that the British people would have come through big, but it was all the Americans. Americans, if there's anything we love, it's British rappers. And it just came through and I lost. and it's a real bummer.

But congratulations to you. Did I win like two in a row? Yeah. So, okay. So, yeah, we're very much like, it's always a game. And, you know,

just as we've talked about many, many a time, the decentralization, the fractious nature, like how there's like, it's really hard to predict anything and also like things that used to get like

25 to 30 reviews now get maybe 12. We're in a different era. Yeah, it's definitely chaotic here in the fantasy draft. The next draft is going to be interesting because I think there's a lot of big albums coming up. So that's going to be July, August, September, the third quarter. So we're going to have some good records to choose from. So that'll be cool.

Let's get to the meat of the episode. We haven't called it the meat in a while. Let's start with Heim. We're reviewing their new record. It's out today. It's called I Quit. It's their first record in five years. And before we get into like that record itself, I wanted to pull back and have like a big picture conversation about this band.

Because frankly, I'm a little surprised by the reception to this record. You look, you go on Metacritic and they have like a 77 right now, which is a disaster. Frankly, for a band like Haim. I mean, we were talking on this show, I feel like last year even, I think I was talking about this, how one of the predictions I made was that Heim was going to put out a record and it was going to be called the album of the year. Because they just seemed like a band that they've been around for a while now. They seem like a generational touchstone, a foundational influence on like a lot of,

I think, indie or indie adjacent music of the last decade. made. Their last record, Women and Music Part 3, was hailed as possibly their best record. And it just seemed like, oh yeah, we're in a world now, like, where Hym is just going to be like one of the most critically acclaimed bands, and it's just going to be money in the bank. Now, I think this record is pretty flawed, so the record itself wouldn't warrant maybe that kind of praise. But I do wonder, because I feel like the conversation around this record has been muted. And I know it's hard to judge. You talk about decentralization. I've talked about how, like, on social media, critics are kind of all over the place now. Like, there's some people on Twitter,

there's some people on blue sky. I guess there's probably people on threads. I don't know who's over there, but maybe there's some people over there. So it's harder to gauge sometimes what the consensus is in a way that we could have, when the last time record came out five years ago. But I no, it makes me wonder a little bit if Hime is like the ultimate millennial band. Like was this a band that like people who were like in their late 20s, early 30s, you know, moving through that era in the 2010s, that this is just the band that they love and that maybe the generation coming up now doesn't care about them as much. Because it does feel like 2025, I think we've seen enough records now through the midpoint of the year, kind of feels like a year of reckoning

for a lot of artists that were big in the 2010s or even the early 2020s, where they're just not getting like the rubber stamp approval anymore. It feels like the records, I mean, the records themselves, I think have been flawed. I think there's been like a lot of flawed albums put out this year by like big ticket artists. But, you know, whether you're talking about like Lucy Dacus, Japanese breakfast, car seat headrest, and now Hime, it feels like a shift is happening. And we talked about this in the 2010s, like around 2013 or so. You started to see like a newer generation emerging and maybe some of the 2000s favorites starting to move into the background.

It's happening a little bit later now, maybe because of COVID. You know, we're lagging a little bit, but I wonder, it feels like 2025 might be that year. the Heim record to me could be more evidence of that. Yeah, and I don't think you're, I don't think that you're lumping, say, turn style into that because, you know, they were big in 2018, but like big in 2021. And their album just, like, debuted in the top 10 on Bill. Yeah, I wouldn't put, yeah. I also think their record is better than a lot of these other records.

I mean, people have disagreed about that a little bit, but for me, I think that record delivers in a way that those other albums I mentioned don't necessarily. And I think that, yeah, I feel like we have this conversation with so many records where it's like, hey, do you get the feeling there's not a lot of buzz behind this one? Because, you know, like people were when relationships first draw, it's like a song of the summer. And, you know, that didn't come to pass. I feel like there's really nothing that's being talked about aside from like Addison Ray. Well, that's clearly the best song on the record, I think. Relationships, I would say.

I mean, there's some other, I mean, I like the record more than, I think, a lot of critics. But they definitely led with, like, the most undeniable song. Yeah. From the album. Yeah. I do think, yeah, there is, yeah, like, it's hard. Again, this is an ongoing conversation. It's hard for things to break through.

But I do think it's not just breaking through. There is also, I'm getting the sense from, like, this generation of bands. You just see it. You saw it in the 2010s. oh in 2013 a lot of these bands they kind of put out records that like were good but like not as good as what they did before it just felt like there's like less excitement at this moment in their career and I feel like there's maybe a cohort of artists where we're where we're reaching that possibly right now yeah I think though I mean this has always been the case even though they don't totally overlap with

their timelines they comparing it to vampire weekend like I've always viewed these two bands as being if not inextricably linked like very similar and um yeah it's interesting because hind to me has been like maybe one of the most bulletproof bands of the past i don't know 15 years and i say that like looking back on the something to tell you their second album that has 69 on metacritic that was like not really well received um which is very interesting because that's not how i remember it but um yeah i think with like high I mean, the last Vampire Weekend album was really critically acclaimed that carried water for me in a fantasy draft. And, yeah, I just think that, like, with Heim, I kind of wanted them to make a really bad record, you know?

Because, like, this record's messy. I love the fact that Dave Fridman is on this because this, you know, the first time I saw Heim live, this was like a year or so before Days are gone. They were opening for Phantom Planet at the Trubidor. and Dave Friedman produced the second Phantom Planet album self-titled one. So shout to the brat. But yeah, this is, it's very similar in that way to the last Vampire Weekend record because that album was like a little bit more louder, messier, more loose ends. And, you know, this album also, you know, there's a lot of the narrow...

People like that record, though, more. Yeah, which is interesting. And I think that record, see, the thing about this record that I think is, fascinating is, you know, it's been presented as a breakup record. I mean, that has been how it's been talked about from the beginning. You know, the band, you know, the Hymn members are on TikTok making videos about like bad breakup stories or bad exes that they've had in the past. And it's been very much about how this album has been marketed. But I am more interested in like how the music reflects that. Because when you listen to the lyrics, I mean, Daniel Hime is really going after

her ex-boyfriend, who is Ariel Reichstad, who is the producer of the first three Heim records. And the recurring theme is that, and again, I don't know these people, I'm just reading into the lyrics, that she's really presenting him as like this sort of controlling person, and that she felt like she wasn't free in the relationship. And when you listen to the music on this album, it does remind me, I wrote this in my review, which you can read uprocks after this episode, that it feels like visiting the apartment of someone who just broke up with their ex

and they're rebelling against their old partner by like rearranging the furniture and like maybe changing like the pictures on the wall. You know, like, you can't control me anymore. I can do what I want. And there is like a recklessness, I think, relative to the other Heim records of like some of the aesthetic choices on this album.

I mean, we can, talk about the big one for me, which is the last track, which is kind of a bonkers song where they are heavily borrowing from the U2 song NUM from Zeropa, which if you remember, that's the song where Edge is speaking in a monotone over this like industrial type like guitar and in rhythm. Like a very strange U2 song to pull from. I mean, it's strange for Hym to be. pulling from U-2 at all, although I guess, I mean, there have been, I think, other crossings of these, wasn't U-2 involved like in an, didn't Hime and U-2 collaborate previously? Am I imagining this?

I feel like there was a previous one. I might have to look this up. Yeah, there you go again, confusing Hym with L'OWain. Well, I was going to say, like, this year, we've got the Hym song pulling from Zeropa, and we have Lil-Wain putting Bono. on a song. If we get one more sort of like critically mixed album that has you two on it, we have a trend for 2025. But again, I just feel like there's some sort of chaotic choices on this record that run contrary to like how well curated time records normally are. I mean,

like you hear relationships and I was like, oh yeah, this is a song I can imagine playing at the Ace Hotel like when I'm checking in. Yeah, this is a perfect soundtrack. for that. And that's sort of a joky way to say it, but that is like a good song. I think that's a really good song. But there are other moments on the record that really feel out of character for Heim in a way

that I find interesting. I mean, I overall, I like this record. I like that it's flawed. Because I think it is an interesting departure from a lot of the types of records that this band normally makes. Yeah, and for me, like

the term that we use all the time is like shittiness. And I think that's your term. Yeah. This is your big theory. Yeah. The shittiness theory. Yeah.

And Hym is like the antithesis of that. And I think with me it's, um, not on this record though. Ah, I, I, I, this is the record you ought to like. I know, right? Because you're always like, well, vampire weekend, they're like the kids at Jewish camp that would be likable or whatever. This is Hym. I think sounding as much like an indie.

rock band and less like a pop band than they've ever sounded on a record yeah and the the this was like this is like a mean record there's a lot of zingers on this one um and yet what's ariel gonna i want to know is you gonna get the hippos back together i don't know yeah she really goes after him yeah on this album yeah but um and i i do appreciate the energy but there's something about it still that seems like they it seems like just like Hein can never fail you know what I mean like even when they're trying to do something that's messy it's like a kind of like a like a very curated uh Instagram story you know about like just like you're you're going through this breakup but you still kind of it's still like very well the aesthetics are good um I don't know man like what about sampling

freedom 90 on the I did not like that see exactly exactly so you're you're kind of contradicting yourself here. I do think that they are acting in a way on this record. I don't think it's like they can never fail. I think they fail on this record. And I think they do some things that don't really work

that in a weird way make it more interesting than some of the albums that are just sort of perfect. I think you can criticize this album for not working, but to say that oh it's like it doesn't fail, that strikes me is not true at all about this album. I think it maybe just gets the, and maybe I'm just like letting the narrative speak for me because, I mean, I think that I will find this album more interesting like four months from now. Like when I have more distance from the way it's being talked about.

And I can revisit it and it kind of like quiets away. But yeah, it's like, I know this is the one that I should like. I really do know it because in some ways it's it is like you know them make you kind of like a 1975 album with like the kind of overly on the nose lyrics and like the samples that don't quite work. Yeah, I would like I think maybe in four months I'll revisit it but it would be interesting to see just someone go off on this band in the same way that you could like people to this day make hating on vampire weekend like part of their identity. You know what I mean?

Like, this maybe feels more like a soft failure than like someone just like absolutely bringing the knives out, which I would, you know, I think that would be interesting. Well, I mean, I think there were criticisms of the second record, like you said, didn't have a great meta-critics score. I didn't write a very good, very positive review of that album. And I, of course, had some accusations of malfeasance online because of that. But yeah, you're right. I mean, the big difference between Hymne and Vampire Weekend is that Vampire Weekend has always been a polarizing band from the very beginning. And Hime, I think, is a band that, like, you know, if you're like Jeff Barrow from Stere, that's Stereoap, Portis Head, like that dude, like he's famous for ripping on Hym. And there's certainly, I mean, I think with Hime, it's not that people don't like them.

I think that they have had a lot of sort of backhanded praise. and they talk about this in their interviews about not being treated like a rock band that they don't get played on like contemporary rock radio and they get treated more as a pop act than as a rock act and I think with good reason because they definitely have a lot of pop flavor in their music but in a weird way I think this is like their rockiest record at least from a sort of philosophical standpoint. They leave more of the rough edges in than they normally do. And I think that's a

carryover from the previous record too. I mean, Dave Friedman was also involved in that album. He mixed, I think, four songs on that record. And he mixed the entire record this time. So I think that's an interesting thing. I don't know. This record I don't think is completely successful, but in a way I think that's maybe the Hym record that I wanted. And I might be in the minority. on that. But it's a really interesting record. I hope they don't take five years to make their next one. But we'll see. We'll see how people respond to I Quit once it gets up to the general population. Okay, well, let's get to our next record. It's by a band. I guess they're now in New York, but I think of them as a Midwestern band because they started in Minneapolis. They're called Hotline T&T.

They have a new record out today called Raspberry Moon. You might remember this band from a few years ago. they dropped their second record, which was called Cartwheel, and it was their breakout record, ended up on a lot of year-endless. It was in my year-end top 10. And it was looked at as like one of the leading, I guess, examples of like shoegays in indie rock. It was this really kind of blown out sounding record with like submerged pop melodies and just a really great album.

And with this new record, again called Raspberry Moon, which was by the way recorded in. my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. One of the finest records, I think, I can say, to be recorded in Appleton. In collaboration with Amos Pitch, the DIY Maestro, you might know him from the band Tenement, but he's also like in a million other bands. This is the first record where Will Anderson, who's the frontman of Hotline T&T, is working with a more or less solid band. The last record was him working in collaboration with the producer, which I think you can tell from that album has more of like a maybe homemade, lo-fi quality. This is a much bigger and beefier sounding album.

Alex Farrar mixed this record, and you might know his name from the lighter notes of many popular indie rock records from the last few years. He's worked a lot with M.J. Lenderman, worked a lot with Wednesday, worked a lot with other artists of that ilk in that northern. Carolina area. And this is a bigger record. I would say it's not a shoegays record. I know I interviewed Will Anderson for Up Rocks, which you can read after this episode. And he's backed away from the Shugays label. This is just a straight up rock record. Similar to Turnstile, people want to call that a hardcore record instead of a rock record. People might want to call this a Shugays record rather than the rock record. There's a weird thing in criticism where we just don't want to call somebody a rock

band apparently. You always got to be in some sub-genre. But this is just a big, beautiful rock record. And I think it's like one of the best straight-up rock records I've heard in the first half of 2025. It's different than Cartwheel. In some ways, I like it more. In other ways, I would say that maybe Cartwheel has a sort of idiosyncratic sound to it. And this maybe sounds a little more, I guess, normal. Some people might object to that. But I think it works for the songs. Julia's War, the single from the album, just a total anthem, great chorus. It just implores you to sing along. You know, if you like heavy guitars and you like melodies in combination with that, you're going to like this record. It's just a really, really good rock record, in my opinion.

Yeah, I mean, I can understand the local pride of it being recorded in Appleton, Wisconsin. I mean, does it top the best records recorded in my hometown, such as urge overkill saturation? and Fuji's the score shot at Studio 4. Yeah. But yeah, with this record, I do think it's a rock record for sure because, gosh, the shoegaze people questioned whether cartwheel was even shoegaze. I mean, it's gotten to the point where it's damn near like emo where people are questioning, like, oh, real shoegaze.

Real shoegays only refers to the original UK shoegays scene. But initially, and I think a lot of this, is due to the streaming platform in which I got it. I didn't quite like it as much. And also like cartwheel just starts out with like just such an incredible one two punch. And this one, I think the second song, it's like an interlude, which is a little bit interesting. But I've come to like this record a lot. I know it's on the same label as the previous one, third man records. Is that a major label or is it like still considered an indie? I have not investigated the corporate relationships of third man records.

I don't know, maybe like Jimmy Iovine is checking in on them. You know, he's got like, he's got an opposite third man. I have no idea. Let's just say it's indie. Yeah. Either way, it does sound like what, you know, a lot of their aesthetic is 90s. This sounds like the major label Hotline T&T album in that they have a band now. They have a producer.

But it's not like, it's not like, it's like, to the same degree that like candy apple. Gray was like the major label Husker Do album. It doesn't sound... Well, but they're not working like with Butch Vig or like Scott Lit here. I mean, it's still like a pretty DIY record working with like Amos Pitch and Appleton. You know, like, let's not get a twist it that they're going

to like record plant and or Sound City and making like you know, Siamese dream here. I, I, to me, it is a good balance of sounding shinier and bigger and sharper without sacrificing

too much of that sort of underground DIY charm that people like from Cartwheel. Yeah, totally. It's relative, the slickness. But yeah, it sounds like what a major label, like, indie rock record might sound like in 2025, not like the distinction between indie and major label in like 1985 or 1995. You know what I mean? Right. This is what I would expect if they somehow got signed to, like, RCA, you know?

Right. And definitely when I was, you know, interviewing Will, he was very, very important. very direct about how he wanted to make a record that would sound good in bigger rooms. And that's always the challenge, I think, for a band like this. You know, because Will's been in the DIY scene for like 15 years. I mean, when I talked to him, he was talking about how he still feels guilty about how they don't do all-age of shows anymore. You know, because that was the ethic for a long time.

You got to play a show that anyone could. can go to, but at some point, if you want to be a bigger band, you've got to play clubs and bars. And so that's where he's coming from, feeling a little bit of guilt about that, but at the same time, just embracing being a rock band like never before. And I think it totally works. And this is a band that I cheer for. You know, again, I think Will has paid his dues. He's a likable guy.

I guess he's also a Wisconsin guy. and I'm always going to go to bat for all the Skonis out there, whether you're Justin Vernon or like the violent femmes or my boys in the Bodine's or Will Anderson, Hotline T&T. He doesn't live here right now, although he said that he's dying to move back to the Midwest, so I think he needs to do that. Come back to the cradle of the country,

the real America, the heartland. It's not the real America. I'm joking about that. But I don't know. Because I guess they're like one of the bigger bands in New York. I don't think of them as a New York band. Even this record, I think, it sounds like a record out of Minneapolis. I hear Hoosker Do, like, all over this album.

Yeah, especially like the acoustic songs towards the end, which I think are really, really good. One of them definitely has, like, kind of Goo Goo Dolls, like a boy named Goo Type sound to it. I forget the name of the song. But, yeah, also, neglected to mention Citizen. and King in your Wisconsin shoutouts. Definitely. But, you know, this record I do like, and I do think of them as like a New York band because when Cartwheel came out or even before then, I just kind of knew them as a band that

New York people talked about a lot. And yeah, that's why Cartwheel just, I did not expect to sound like that because I was familiar with this previous band Weed, which was doing kind of more of a Avlov sort of early 2010 sort of indie rock kind of adjacent to emo thing. But what this record makes me think about is, like, the bigger rooms, this makes me miss pitchfork festival. Like, that is the proverbial hole in my floor right now that is that we need for support, because the best way for me to have gauged how this album advances the hotline TNT narrative

is that are they going to be playing at 530 this year? They would definitely be playing Pitchfork Fest 2025. And now I'm not so sure about how this pushes the, I don't know, moves the ball forward. I know he is not, he wants to avoid having basketball metaphors applied to his band, but I'm just trying to see like how this advances the ball. I think of them as like maybe having like a cloud nothing's type trajectory where once they're kind of outside of like the center of discussion, they just keep on making really solid records every two years and then you look back like,

damn, Hotline TNT's got a really good catalog. Yeah, well, that would be a great turnout. A lot of bands, I think, would love to aspire to that type of trajectory. So good luck to them, cheering for your Hotline TNT. This is a great record, and you all should check it out. Let's get to our mailbag segment. It's great to hear from our listeners.

Thank you for reaching out. You can hit us up at Indycast Mailbag at gmail.com. Ian, you want to read this one? I do. So this comes to us from Jarrett, from Dallas, Texas. Very pro-sports cast and especially love college football cast with Ian, which I'm glad we'll be back here in just a few short months. So, yeah, shout to Jarrett.

I was playing around with Chat GBT, our new Overlord, and asked it to score some albums as if it were one of you. For example, it gave Anxious's new album, Bambi, a 7.8 as Ian and anywhere from a 7.8 to an 8.1 is Stephen's case, though harder to tell, that seems high. So I like it more than you in this rubric, I guess? Fuck, man. I mean, that, yeah, I mean, that's like one of my favorite albums of the half year. Well, we might be talking about that in the near future. Is that because they sometimes sound like gin blossoms? I wonder if that's why I got that score. Maybe. For one of the more random

albums I could think of. It reviewed Gerard Way's hesitant alien and GPT, Ian, gave it a 6.4 to a 6.7. Whereas GPT Steve is 7.5 to 7.8. Either of these feels all that accurate just as a guess. Lastly, I had it score indie tennis player fan. That's a callback baby. Kevin Morby's city music, which turns out Ian reviewed and gave an 8.1. GPT, Steve mostly agreed with a 7.8 to 8.0. All of this is to say that while a fun exercise, the only score that really stands up as feeling accurate, it was the one that was actually scored by one of you, in this case, city music. It's a fun thing to do, though, to see what the machine comes up with and left me curious, if you put in some of your favorite albums or least favorite albums, could the GPD

Indycast stand in and accurately guess your taste? Keep rocking. Jared from Dallas, Texas. So this is tricky because in my career, I have not usually scored albums. Like when I worked at the A.B. Club, we graded albums. And I have written for pitchfork. And obviously, those are were scored, but I'm not really a score guy. So that's not really like an accurate way of imitating me in the in the AI sphere. I actually did enter a prompt into chat GPT where I said write something like Stephen Hayden. And I did this like a week ago. This is before we got this email. And it spat out this prompt or this essay which was about me listening to Jesus, etc. on a bus

to Madison, Wisconsin in 2013 while being hung over. And I read this thing and I thought is, is Jet CheapetyT making fun of me? It felt like they were making fun of me here.

Because it was definitely like every cliche I think of like my writing was in this. And I was actually impressed by how good it was. It wasn't perfect. And it was clearly written by a robot, but it just makes me think that I've got about another six months in this business before chat GPT just totally takes over. Or conversely, maybe I'll just

start writing like five books a year because I'll just have, I'll just be working the chat GPT. I'll just be hitting that button over and over again. Have you entered your stuff into there at all? I mean, people have showed me stuff and they'll say like, you know, Ian Cohen is someone who's passionate, but also has a slightly detached, you know, like slightly detached viewpoint. I'm like, it's not entirely untrue. But as like a kind of like tuning exercise, you know, like you hit the tuning fork. I did pitchfork review of Jimmy World's Clarity written by Ian Cohen. And not all of these prompts gave me a score. This one gave an 8.7, which, you know, this is like probably my favorite album of all time. what's it doing getting an 8.7?

But then again, the Sunday review of Clarity, which ran a couple of years ago, was not written by me, but someone who also participated in the Vulture Greatest Emo's Songs of all Timeless, that was given an 8.6. So whatever, I probably would have, you know, folded and let them give it that score. The funniest part, though, was that it had a published date of March 15, 2007, which is sort of kind of accurate because that album did get reissued in May. of 2007, but that being said, pitfork in 2007 would absolutely not allow a positive Jimmy E. World Review. So, still some tweaking to do. So what I did is, I thought it would be interesting to run

reviews of albums I've actually reviewed to see how that comes out. And I did one with Celebration Rock. That gave it an 8.3. And I also did it on the other end with Childish Gambino's Camp. that got a 7.6. But like you actually reviewed that though. Like why wouldn't it just spit out the score you actually gave? Yes. And this is why we've got maybe 12 months, maybe not six months, you know, before the singularity approaches.

And I'm very confused by that. I know. And it was like a positive review because I tried an album I didn't review, but there's a lot of me writing about it, like the Hotel Year's Goodness. And that review was an 8.4, which, look, I lived in 2016. They weren't given best new music to Emo at that time. So it's getting there. And the review is like oddly smoothed over.

It's kind of like writing with motion smoothing. It says some things that like someone who was trying to, if not make fun of me, do a passable imitation of me, would say. saw zero references to the Simpsons, so they still got some work to do. But, yeah, I mean, I think, though, that they were absolutely right about the anxious album. Like, if I had written about that,

if I did an interview for Uprocks, which you can go read after this episode's over, it almost certainly would have got a 7.8. I would have pushed for higher, and they would be like, eh, give it a 7.8. Also, shout to that Gerard Way solo album. How it's going to be is probably the best new pornographer

song of the past 15 years, so I know I'm like a little hesitant to mention that band now. But I didn't love that album, but that song's great. How's it going to be? I probably liked that more than most My Chemical Romance songs. Yeah, I remember liking that album too. I wrote about it for Grantland. Again, no score, but I liked it.

So maybe there was something just fed into the AI that knew that and they assigned a score to it, Metacritic style. I don't know. But yeah, let's just hope that AI doesn't have an Indycast function. Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe that'll like the slightly off nature of it will like mispronounce things the same way that we do. Or like it'll pronounce things so correctly that people will know it's not us. We've now reached part of our episode that we call a recommendation corner where Ian and I talked about something we're into this week. Ian, why don't you go first? Yeah, well, in the process of debating whether or not I'm going to use AI to write my book, you know, as I've hit a bit of a wall, it's been a little bit tough for me to listen to a lot of news. new music, so I'm pulling something from the archives. Yeah, it's something that's two months old,

which feels veritably ancient nowadays. This one is a band or a project. They don't really feel like a band because it's largely electronic, but I've been keeping tabs on this band. They're called real lies. And they've been around for about a decade now. They're part of this surprisingly bustling subgenre of UK artists whose whole thing is like, imagine if the streets weak become heroes was their only song. Like that was the only kind of song they made. They didn't make, you know, fit but you know it, or let's push things forward. It's just these songs that is a British guy and kind of a talk, mumbly, half-wrap cadence

talking about his youth in the raves over some airy throwback rave beats. Can't get it out for that stuff. But, you know, I only like them as a band who put out singles. This album, it's called We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, is a pretty huge. huge leap over what they've done before. And I don't just say that because there's not one but two songs that mention deaf tones tattoos. The first one says like white pony tattoos.

So you think, oh, maybe it's not that. But then they say deaf tones tattoo in a later song. I'm like, hell yeah. Very emotional experience. Very much like put your arm over your lad and think about the rave days gone by. Beautiful beats. Kind of shocked that more people aren't talking about this because it's not like a new project. It's maybe, actually maybe it's less like.

to be talked about because it's kind of an old project and it's kind of harder for those bands to gain momentum. I saw like maybe one review of this. It was from someone who writes for pitchwork though, but I think it was for The Guardian. Definitely one of my favorite albums of the year. I just love this. It really makes me wish I have like a rave youth instead of like sitting around in my, you know, high school bedroom playing Golden Eye listening to Tool.

So if you feel that way. Yeah, I actually had friends who like, That's what we did. We like, we'd like listen to Tool play like Golden Eye on N64 and then they got into raves and I like never saw them again. See, I think that's what raves are though. It's just people in Warehouse is playing Golden Eye and listening to Tool. You see all the flashing lights outside, but then you go in and you realize, oh wait,

this is like way more chill than I would have guessed. I'm going to do a chat GPT song like, hey, write a realized song but like mentioned listening to Aynema and playing like Crash Bandicoot. Oh my God. That sounds like a beautiful combination. I want to talk about a record called Planting by the Signs by a Kentucky native singer-songwriter named S. G. Goodman. I came aboard with her in 2022. She put out a great record called Teeth Marks, which made my year-end list. And, you know, this artist, I think, really kind of fits a mold that a lot of other artists of her ilk

and that sort of indie Americana space are trying to emulate. You know, you hear Lucinda Williams get name checked all the time now and then you listen to the record and you don't really actually hear anything that sounds like Lucinda Williams. But I think S. G. Goodman

hits that mark closer than most. I mean, she's writing these songs that have like a lot of grit and emotion to them. Sometimes they're political, sometimes they're personal. But they also like really have like, a great groove to them. Like they chugel, not to use a word I use all the time, but it is definitely applicable here. So you've got that combination of, again, really smart, heartfelt songwriting

that also has like a real soul and that kind of Saturday night at like the juke joint, juke joint type place. It's hard to say juke joint, by the way. I don't say that often in my regular life. It just has like a real swagger and to it along with all the smarts. in the lyrics. So I like this record quite a bit, and I think this artist is really good. Again, her name is S. G. Goodman, and the album is called Planting by the Signs. That about does it for this episode of Indycast. We'll be back with more news, reviews, and hashing out trends next week. And if you're looking for more music recommendations, sign up for the Indie Mixape newsletter. You can go to uprocks.com backslash indie,

and I recommend five albums per week, and we'll send it directly to you. your email box.