On January 27, Hotline TNT kicked off The Trip, a mini-tour across five nights in five typically-overlooked cities with Wishy, Horse Jumper of Love, The Tubs, & Canaries.

By Harry Sutton

It’s not easy for a mid-sized band to make a living in 2026. Touring costs continue to balloon, the venues that once sustained scenes are disappearing, and DSPs funnel fractions of pennies to the artists they depend on. It’s even harder if your music isn’t available on the world’s biggest streaming platform. Hotline TNT pulled their music from Spotify last year due to a litany of issues with the company’s values, such as then-CEO Daniel Ek’s investments in AI military technology, but they’ve found their own way to navigate the industry.

Frontman Will Anderson has lived and breathed DIY music for nearly twenty years now. Despite the band releasing albums with Third Man Records, being named in Pitchfork’s Best New Music, and even hiring a booking agent, there’s a bare-knuckle spirit to Anderson that can never truly be extinguished. This January, Hotline TNT embarked on their second series of DIY-inspired caravan-style shows called “The Trip.” Before kicking off the five-night tour, Anderson sat down with me in the green room at Space Ballroom in Hamden, CT. 

“There are people in this country and in the world that are so disgusted about what’s going on that they have to create their own world. And that’s really what DIY music is for us,” Anderson tells me, attributing the quote to Hotline’s drummer Mike Ralston. Dressed in a fluorescent orange jacket with a Big Bird pin and a hat reading “I Hate Everybody,” Anderson is excited for the tour, but our conversation quickly strays from The Trip. 

“Anything this band does to nudge people away from the status quo — which I think is not a good thing for music or music lovers — I think is a nudge worth making,” he said. Resistance to authority was a throughline across our whole chat. “I wish I was more hardcore, sometimes,” he added. 

“Taylor [Swift] alone, if she wanted to — if you’re reading this Taylor — with one phone call you could have made everything better for all artists, but, you know, people love making money.”

This rebellious mentality emanating from Anderson wasn’t just rhetoric. It was embedded in how The Trip was built: five bands moving together, playing 30-minute sets on equal footing, with a revolving lineup to give each band a headlining night across the tour’s five stops.

Hotline assembled the lineup through friendships built over years in the indie rock scene, bringing on the road with them: Boston slowcore trio Horse Jumper of Love, Virginia shoegaze newcomers Canaries, Welsh jangle pop group The Tubs, and Indianapolis outfit Wishy. While the sounds on stage ranged from pure shoegaze distortion to luminous dream pop, Anderson described the bands as “kindred spirits.”

The Trip hit five mid-sized cities and towns across the Northeast . The inaugural tour was inspired by a backyard DIY set with They Are Gutting A Body of Water at South by Southwest in 2023. Anderson said they left the festival asking “Why can’t every show be like that — where it’s all just a bunch of cool bands in a DIY setting?” Just a few months after SXSW, the first iteration of The Trip — with TAGABOW, Enumclaw, Toner, and Sword II — rolled through the West Coast, stopping in bigger markets like Seattle and Los Angeles.

“We’re not from these towns, but we’re from towns like these towns. If this tour had come through Eau Claire, WI, when I was in high school, I would have been there 10,000%,” Anderson tells me. 

That philosophy materialized quickly once the doors opened at Space Ballroom on opening night. The crowd — from tapped-in thrift-store kids to old heads staying in touch with the world of indie rock — arrived in scarves, beanies, and sweaters, dressed for winter and volume.

Wishy, one of the most exciting bands emerging from the Midwest, kicked off the tour with a set entirely composed of unreleased tracks from their upcoming sophomore album. The chemistry between vocalists Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites breathed energy into every jangly, jagged jam. The band’s prior work — a few EPs and 2024’s debut LP Triple Seven — spans from no-wave grit to lush dream pop, but these sneak peeks leaned in a spikier, post-punk direction. Krauter told the audience that it was the first time the band had played any of these songs live. He also admitted that they were nervous to debut them — though it never showed. 

Horse Jumper of Love followed with a showcase on the art of emotional drag. Their sludgy, anchoring guitars stretched across slowcore structures steeped in tension. Tracks like “Disaster Trick” and “Volcano” landed with gravity, while frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos’ grimacing presence didn’t break. Next was Canaries, a Virginia-hailing shoegaze troupe that I hadn’t encountered before seeing the tour poster. Their set felt almost monastic in its devotion to texture, with loose, droney passages blurred into one another under layers of tremolo so thick it felt like Kevin Shields himself might materialize onstage. 

Newtown, CT band Ovlov stepped in for The Tubs, whose flight from London was delayed due to last weekend’s nor’easter— a happy accident that would make Bob Ross proud (The Tubs eventually did make it to the tour, meeting up with the rest of the convoy on night two). Their set fused electrified power pop hooks with melodic vocals sharpened by a hardcore edge, creating a push-and-pull between sweetness and abrasion. Ovlov — whose members live less than 30 minutes from Space Ballroom — played the last-minute call-up like true hometown heroes. Singer Steve Hartlett poked fun at the band’s highest-streaming tracks, and they brought a crowd member who they had met at a show in NYC on stage to play drums for a song. It was improvised, joyful, and slightly unhinged in the best way.

Closing the night, Hotline TNT delivered exactly what the crowd came for: pure riffage, dialed to maximum impact. The band’s power-pop instincts cut cleanly through the distortion, melodies imploding before bursting back out and Anderson looking as locked-in as the songs sounded ferocious. “Julia’s War” drew a full-room singalong — a ragged chorus of “nananas” and “lalalas” — before the band closed with “Trinity,” sealing the night on a note of blown-out catharsis.

As the final notes rang out and the night came to a close, The Trip’s stop in Hamden felt like a classic “this is what it’s all about” moment. A reminder that scenes don’t survive on algorithms or scale, but on people showing up for each other. Five bands, five towns, and a small world briefly built from the ground up.

Aside from raving about the rest of the lineup and condemning capitalist overlords, Anderson managed to mention summer camp three separate times during our conversation. By the end of the night, I got what he meant.

“I always thought that life should be more like summer camp, not the other way around,” he said. “Touring should be more like this.”