Telenova never rushed creating their debut album, but their ascent to the record still feels rapid.
Two EPs in three years (2021’s Tranquilize and 2022’s Stained Glass Love) marked the band as one to watch in Australian music, their art-pop gems, with frequent trip-hop diversions and electronic flourishes, gaining them a strong national following.
2023 saw them release just one single, “Lost in the Rush,” but they were really, we know now, just preparing for the biggest year of their career to date in 2024.
Released last week (August 16th), Telenova’s debut album, Time Is a Flower, is bigger, bolder, and more ambitious than the band’s previous releases, successfully expanding their already artistic universe.
There are standout tracks like new single “Margot,” which takes its name from a certain famous Australian actor (a nod to the band’s avowed love of cinema), and the darkly alluring “Power,” named as a ‘Song You Need to Know’ by us in April.
The sleekness of Time Is a Flower is rendered even more impressive when you find out that Telenova self-produced the album, all while exploring weighty themes in their lyrics, as if they’d been doing this together for much longer than three years.
In the midst of their busy touring schedule, which currently finds Telenova in Australia, the trio of Angeline Armstrong, Edward Quinn and Joshua Moriarty found the time to break down their debut album in more detail, which you can read below.
Telenova’s Time Is a Flower is out now. Find the band’s tour dates here.
Time Is a Flower Track-by-Track:
“The Wallpaper”
Ange: Lyrically, the songs across the album share a lot of motifs and imagery – something we never intended but which happened organically over the period of time we were writing the album and then curating what songs would make it in.
I wanted a literal prelude to the album that functioned as an opening statement or kind of treatise really – both musically and lyrically – setting the scene for the narrative that’s to follow across the album. It introduces the motif of “I’ve got a feeling I’ve been here before” and the title “The Wallpaper” seemed suitably poetic too, as it’s literally laying the backdrop to the scenes that are about to play out after it.
“Teardrop”
Ed: The foundation of this track was lying around on an old laptop of mine for a while. I think I made it during Melbourne’s second lockdown during COVID. I had a heap of stuff that I hadn’t showed Ange or Josh when we were writing the record because I’d nearly forgotten about it, but when they heard this they instantly wanted to work on it. It’s a pretty freaky sounding song, so I didn’t know if it would work for Telenova. But once Josh and Ange injected it with their special sauce, it all came together. I love that dirty sounding piano and the turkey sample at the start.
“Power”
Josh: This is the only co-writes on the record outside of the band – we worked with Melbourne producer Styalz Fuego on it. We started from scratch, there was no song or bare bones, we built it all in the studio with Styalz and Ange wrote the vocal melody that day during the session. Ange and I spent quite a bit of time on the lyrics, it went through two or three iterations before we landed on the metaphor of a flower in love with the sun and night time approaching and it’s fear of death in the darkness. We didn’t add a lot more to the production – there are a few guitars here and there and some piano sprinkles.
“Margot”
Ange: The song is about the self-destructive nature of envy and comparison – especially in the social media age – how we can watch someone from afar and think they’re so perfect, more pretty, have it all together, never insecure, have the perfect life… basically think they must’ve come straight from heaven as if they were a god. But slowly the more you get to know people, the more you realise everyone is just as insecure as you are and the perfect image is a facade. “Margot” isn’t one person for me. It’s just a name I gave to encapsulate all the Margots out there that we, especially women, I think, compare ourselves to relentlessly.
In terms of why “Margot” for the name – I’d just watched the film About Time and Margot Robbie plays this real classic blond bombshell tease who’s always sunbathing on the lawn flicking through pages of a book and flirting with her best friend’s brother from a distance – that image is what sparked the first line of the song. Such a classic image. Thanks Margot. The song quickly evolved beyond that first line but it was the original building block!
“Tremors, Traces”
Josh: With “Tremors, Traces,” it came from a chord progression I came up with at my home studio while we were working together. We wanted to make an Avalanches-style slow dance groove number and I think we hit the brief. In the bridge there is a nice little chord change to make the ears prick up and add a little flair. The strings were done by Melbourne composer Tamil Rogeon and the rest of the instrumentation was recorded at Head Gap studio in Melbourne.
“January”
Ed: There’s a lot to be said about the incredible lyrics on “January,” but I’ll focus on the music. Josh and I made this beat when Ange was away for a couple of weeks I think. So we’d try and make three beats a day and then listen to them the next week and decide whether they were dogshit or not. We were going a little crazy and I was joking around, pretending to wail on the guitar, but accidentally hit the perfect note to introduce the chorus. I don’t usually talk about Guitar Hero stories, but this one was a complete accident that came out of a joke. And now it’s one of my favourite moments on the record.
Credit: Clint Peloso
“Restless”
Ange: When I first heard the crunchy, lo-fi water sample alongside the piano chords, this song felt like a score of a scene to me. I immediately heard this sort of whispery, intimate, dry voice speaking. I remember watching the behind-the-scenes on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (one of my favourite films), and Michel Gondry talking about how the internal voiceovers in that film were all done super quiet and super close to the mic, to create this sense of being right inside someone’s head, super intimate. I wanted the voice to have that kind of feel. It’s a part II to the intro track, “The Wallpaper,” in many ways. [It] acts as another anchor that threads the narrative of the songs on the album together. This reaching and longing for something divine, but being drawn back into the mundane of the everyday, the cyclical experience of “I’ve got a feeling I’ve been here before,” had these thoughts, felt this way, asked these questions…
“Time Is a Flower”
Ed: We recorded this one with Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear) in London. The sound that he got out of the guitar in that chorus was exactly what I was hoping to bring to the sessions we had with him. It just kind of explodes perfectly with that reverb into the abyss as Ange is singing. This song will always remind of that incredible time we spent two days with Chris working on Telenova tracks. Dream come true.
“Discothèque Inside My Head
Josh: This was a song I wrote the beat for. I had recorded a guitar part on my iPhone and used that sample in the track. The opening guitar sound is my electric guitar recorded through the iPhone microphone. I was sort of going for a Dandy Warhols 4-chord chorus thing. It took on new life once Ed added a bunch of sprinkles in the bridge and we added live percussion.
The bridge vocals were actually written last minute on the last day at the recording studio while tracking everything for the album – call it a lucky break. The bass sound is killer if I do say so myself – it’s a Rickenbacker copy that I have played hard with a pick. The reference for bass tone was “Electric Feel” by MGMT as I’d seen some kid on TikTok playing along to that song earlier in the week before we went into the studio, and he was playing a Rickenbacker so I thought we’d give it a go.
“Preamble”
Ange: It’s funny how this one came in towards the end of the writing period. [It] was a happy accident really from Ed just mucking around with old vocal stems, a voice memo, and a beat he really liked. We wanted to keep that same chopped up/sample-y feel in the final version of the song. The repeated lyric “I’ve got a feeling I’ve been here before” is a key sentiment across the album, this questioning of the nature of time and our place in it, this returning time and time again to the same thoughts and longings about existence and the human condition.
“Heaven’s Calling”
Ed: I think this is the oldest song on the record. We wrote this around the time of the first EP but it seemed like a perfect switch up for the album. I love Ange’s little “ahhhhs” at the start and how the beat keeps on growing, but never overtakes the atmosphere that the nylon guitar creates. I also LOVE this song because it’s easy to replace “Heaven’s Calling” with “Alec Baldwin.”
“Bird of Paradise”
Josh: This was one of the first songs we wrote for the record, but as things came together we always knew it would be the closing track. The drum break has some magic in it. It feels alive and has a sick trip hop feel to it. Tamil Rogeon did the string arrangement which really took it to another level. The guitar solo at the end was recorded at my home studio by Ed. We never tried to re-record it because it had a certain unhinged magic.
