By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring a staff favorite that missed our Best Albums of 2025 list in Hotline TNT’s RASPBERRY MOON, and an early frontrunner for best post-hardcore albums of the year in Feels Like Heaven’s WITHIN DREAMS!
Hotline TNT – RASPBERRY MOON
Favorite Tracks: “Candle,” “Where U Been?”
Genre: Alternative Rock, Jangle Pop, Shoegaze
On previous albums, Hotline TNT frontman Will Anderson could bury his feelings under six feet of effects—hide behind a wall of sound. His band’s third full-length, RASPBERRY MOON, does away with all that, delivering the Brooklyn four-piece’s most polished, straightforward, accessible tunes to date.
The cleaner production highlights songwriting quirks that might have gone unnoticed before: Moments like the chiming melody that crops up at the end of “Break Right” or Anderson’s tender vocal performance on “Lawnmower.” It helps that the songwriting has improved, too. The great secret about Hotline TNT is that they’re a pop rock band pretending to be a shoegaze band, and the tension between those two sides of their sound has long been the driving force behind their music. RASPBERRY MOON is the resolution.
It doesn’t matter how fuzzy the guitars get on “Candle,” they still soar, and Anderson’s deadpan takes the chorus skyward with them. “Letter to Heaven” and “If Time Flies” would be classic jangle-pop tunes if played just a tad straighter—more R.E.M. than Swirlies—and they’re perfect examples of Hotline TNT’s approach on RASPBERRY MOON.
These songs may be dressed up in effects, but the effects are just that, serving the songs rather than the other way around. At its heart, closer “Where U Been?” isn’t a shoegaze song, nor is it trying to be. It’s just a damn fine rock song, and it would be a damn fine song even acoustic (although maybe not a rock song then).
RASPBERRY MOON is Hotline TNT (relatively) stripped back, the purest distillation of themselves—and, maybe coincidentally, it’s their strongest album to date. For the first time ever, they sound like they’re really ready to step into the spotlight. Join them by grabbing RASPBERRY MOON on Bandcamp. [Zac Djamoos]
Feels Like Heaven – WITHIN DREAMS
Genre: Post-Hardcore, Melodic Hardcore
Favorite Tracks: “Volvo (On the Road),” “Snow Dunes,” “Video Loss,” “Take The Rain”
“Go ahead, write another sad song / Tell me all about your pretty thing,” Emanuel Wildung howls on “Snow Dunes. “Type it in bold and cut your hair / See everything you love turn to memories.”
It’s all (perhaps) a bit too intense for the traditional emo crowd while simultaneously feeling too brooding for the melodic hardcore scenesters of 2026, but god damn if Feels Like Heaven aren’t going to write another sad song regardless. The Swedish post-hardcore group’s amped up, bleeding heart dramatics are gripping because the sound lives in a weightless punk grey area—one that reminds me immensely of the hook-forward early 2010s noise rock scene, nailing a washed out melancholy and anger that recalls the genres re-introduction from buzzy favorites like Fucked Up’s DAVID COMES TO LIFE or Cloud Nothings’ ATTACK ON MEMORY.
Feels Like Heaven’s WITHIN DREAMS is, above all else, a portrait of youth fading. It’s about death, and relationships, but importantly it’s about the inside jokes and bonded feelings that linger when all we have left are those exhausted memorie—the borrowed t-shirts, the Dario Argento vinyl, the long drives in a Volvo. On “Sandra Bullock,” Wildung pleads, “My mother said / don’t forget to tell her how you feel.” The whole album acts as an overwhelmed cry into the void, as though they did forget to tell people how they felt and had to write songs as some kind of propitiation. Feels Like Heaven want to be forgiven, even if that’s self-forgiveness, and the ten songs on WITHIN DREAMS are laying out those thoughts and recollections and finding, it feels like, some peace. Released on January 1st, it sets a high bar for the year to come. You can hear it over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
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