Telehealth: 2026

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Telehealth makes music I’d like to call corp. core — or maybe trust-fall punk. Outwardly, it’s a project that borders on performance art, Telehealth leaning all the way into their role as not just a band but a brand. They create irony-steeped commentary on an industry in which musicians are forced to double as marketers — mastering ads, analytics, and algorithms, often spending more time behaving like businesses than actual artists. 

This angle is visibly exemplified by the Seattle band’s internet presence. Their content includes the Telehealth Top Talent casting call, a Life After Tech™ summit, and emoji-packed, corporate-lingo-laden Instagram captions (equal parts hilarious and intentionally stressful to consume) calling on their investors to don’t wait, act now! 

Of course, the gimmick isn’t without a goal. And as for the very legitimate product that Telehealth is pushing, that would be their sophomore album, Green World Image, a “lifestyle soundtrack for collapsing belief systems” that dropped in May via Seattle-based label Sub Pop. 

The lifestyle bit is key here, especially in the lyrics. Across the album, the songs offer a laundry list of nouns serving as instant shorthand for an over-Instagrammed era: avocado toast and oat milk, Glossier and Medicaid, and “Carhartt Dickie clan / Sprinter van to Burning Man” (one of my favorite lines from the album's ninth track, “Cool Job”). 

Packed with millennial-era memes, it’s such an of-this-moment record that it effectively doubles as a time capsule. In 200 years time, one could easily envision a cultural anthropologist cross-referencing GWI to understand what the 2020s were like, based purely on the things Telehealth is poking fun of: living on and for screens, brands, and jobs as identity, images and industries running on validation and vibes. 

That said, the band actually writes the lyrics last. You can’t have a good schtick without a great sound, and on stage is where Telehealth truly (and genuinely) delivers. That’s certainly how I, for one, first fell in love with the band—on a rooftop at SXSW 2024, where they delivered a late-night dance party that served as one of my favorite sets of the fest. 

As for the setup, up front, it’s a synth-forward story. Facing each other over their respective rigs, married couple and collaborators Alexander Attitude and Kendra Cox are positioned like they’re about to play Battleship, swapping vocal duties and occasionally conjuring drumsticks out of thin air to add bonus percussion on top of drummer Ian McCutcheon, bassist John O’Connor, and guitarist Dillon Sturtevant. 

The result is music as fun as it is thoughtful: art punk to first dance and shout along to, then think and talk (and maybe write) about. Two years after I first caught Telehealth in Austin — and two weeks before the new album’s release — I was stoked to witness them strike up another party with a batch of new tracks at Night Club 101. 

Next morning, they traveled uptown for an "FUV Live" session, where the group played three songs from Green World Image: “Cool Job,” “Age of Muralcide” and “Kokomo 2.” 

Kendra and Alexander told me about the universe they’ve created for the record and the world that they’re responding to with their songs: the music business and corporate burnout, the changes (and challenges) of Seattle, and the actual “cool job” that served as inspiration for the song and the thesis of the album.

[Recorded: 5/4/26. Engineered by Jim O'Hara. Produced by Meghan Suma.]