“Our house is, like, half an office right now,” said Alexander Barr over Zoom on a sunny morning in late April. Barr — a founding member of the Seattle band Telehealth — was seated next to Kendra Cox, his wife and the group’s fellow progenitor, on their Capitol Hill living room’s forest-green couch, which had a body pillow on top of it that resembled the Wicked Witch of the West’s arm, replete with red-painted nails and a gold bracelet. The two were about to embark on a tour promoting the band’s second album, “Green World Image”; Barr panned his laptop’s camera to show the stacks of record- and merch-stuffed boxes strewn about, ready to be unpacked at future live stops. But the slightly stressful temporary disorder felt worth it. “(We) can’t wait to get on the road and play music for people and share the record,” Poulsbo-bred Cox said.
Some second albums suffer from the so-called sophomore slump; May 15’s “Green World Image,” the follow-up to Telehealth’s relatively minimalist debut, 2023’s “Content Oscillator,” isn’t among them. It’s a fairly comprehensive step up buoyed by a more expansive live-band approach, shinier production, and sharpened lyrics.
With its propensity for shout-singing and ultra-tight instrumentals, Telehealth might immediately call to mind the B-52s and Talking Heads in sound. (Telehealth is well-aware it kind of sounds like DEVO, too, as evidenced by a winkingly explicit reference to the New Wave icons on “Green World Image”’s “Living, Laughing, Loving, Trying.”) But with its deadpan preoccupation with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary life, Telehealth is also lyrically and spiritually aligned with au courant acts like Dry Cleaning and Marie Davidson, who too are skilled at underscoring the whiplash-inducing absurdity one can feel from one social-media post or news story to the next.
Storied Seattle label Sub Pop Records was a fan first. After sharing some of Telehealth’s music via its Singles Club a few years ago, it announced it was signing the band on Feb. 25 through a press release cheekily littered with the sort of silly corporate lingo so much of Telehealth’s music lampoons. “It’s a big deal for both of us,” Barr said of the Sub Pop affiliation.
When Barr moved to Seattle from his native Phoenix in 2009, it was partly to be in a band he hoped would get that Sub Pop seal of approval. He and the members of that group, Kithkin — whose drummer, Ian McCutcheon, is now in Telehealth — continued their striving for about a decade. Barr and Cox themselves met and began dating about 13 years ago, when they were both playing at the San Juan Islands’ Doe Bay Music Festival. (Cox was in a duo called Lemolo, named after a Poulsbo street she and her bandmate grew up near.) Lemolo broke up in the mid-2010s. Barr quit music in 2019. But the COVID lockdown wound up changing the trajectory of what Barr termed a quarter-life crisis, which resulted in him enrolling in architecture school.
“I was like, ‘oh man, if the world is, like, falling apart, I’m just gonna play music again,’” he said. Cox joined him in an effort that was initially just for fun. Telehealth’s eventual recognition from Sub Pop, Barr said, helped them realize that, “‘yes — this is what (we) want.’”
“Green World Image” was borne of frustration — Cox and Barr wanting to “interact in the world in a way that makes us not be, like, absolute total f—ng a—holes,” Cox put it bluntly. It had been and continues to be surreal and maddening seeing turmoil overseas and domestically juxtaposed in the news and on social media with comparatively trivial content. It felt strange, too, being “a touring musician in a failing system and a failing ecosystem … and we’re on the side with a house burning behind us, being, like, ‘Listen to our album.’” “Green World Image” builds on those tensions in a way that might be cathartic to similarly exasperated listeners while also making them want to dance. “Kind of the only way I feel like we could approach it was to, like, write about it head on,” Cox said.
It’s not uncommon for songs on “Green World Image” to consist of verses that basically encompass lists, mimicking the sensation of doomscrolling and the game of mental and emotional pinball that results. (On “Things I’ve Killed”: “World War / Suns in 4 / VPR / Plant store / Big Boss / Muralcide / Botox”; on “Age of Muralcide”: “We pay you in vibes / Plagiarism scam / Copy paste and jam / Carhartt Dickie clan / Sprinter van to Burning Man.”) Distinctly “extremely online” turns of phrase — “Mother is mothering”; “I’m in my villain era”; “I’m holding on to space for you”; “Very mindful, so demure” — are uttered with the sort of pitch-perfectly mocking tone that’s bound to feel a little vindicating for those of us who found their one-time social-media omnipresence about as pleasant as banging one’s head against a wall.
When writing “Content Oscillator,” Barr tended to be the one starting the process of demoing arrangements, goofing off at home with loops and getting things in decent shape musically before Cox would jump in to further refine things musically and lyrically. Since then, though, Cox and Barr, still the group’s principal songwriters, have reoriented themselves to better accommodate their fairly recently enlisted additional members. The inceptions of songs have remained similar, though on “Green World Image” demos were brought to bandmates in their practice space, where everybody, together and separately, continued perfecting a song’s fuller sound before officially recording it.
“We owe bassist John (O’Connor), Ian, and (guitarist) Dillon (Sturtevant) a lot for making this record breathe more openly,” Barr said. “It has a more distinct personality this time, largely because of them and their participation, and we’re hoping that we can double down on that even more on the next record.”
Telehealth’s extensive current tour kicked off in Cleveland on April 26. After a short break in early May, shows will resume on May 14 at Seattle’s Neumos, with support from Coral Grief and Buddy Wynkoop, for what’s been promoted as an album-release party.
“We’re still trying to grow here, locally, but I think we are trying to be a much larger band outside of just the Pacific Northwest, and we’re trying to figure out how to do that and how to grow the right way instead of, you know, jumping the gun,” Barr said. “We’re just trying to stay smart and be conscious of the things we’re doing and trying to say.”
Keep up to date with “Green World Image”’s release and shows here.