Telenova is on the rise

Visit the Telenova website and you’ll see it too. This is the visual accompaniment to Telenoir Radio – a selection of tracks that share DNA with the Melbourne band interspliced with voicemails left on their Nokia brick by fans. “There’s a duality to the city; I am surrounded by people but I am so alone,” one sighs. Another mumbles happy memories of walking down Swanston Street through the crisp night air with people she loves and has loved. As the clackety drum machine and mechanical swells of Radiohead’s “Idioteque” fade up, it all feels incredibly evocative and a little ominous, like a balmy summer’s eve that suddenly snaps cold.

Besides highlighting some of their favourite artists – such as fellow Melbourne trip-hoppers and tourmates Fade Evare – Telenoir Radio is how the band includes fans in the parallel universe that their new album THE WARNING lives in. Angeline Armstrong – Telenova’s vocalist, storyteller, and creative lead – tells me it’s about “that tension of finding connectivity with people, but we’re still veiled through digital mediums or rushing by train windows.” It’s that transient, half-there-ness that city living demands in the modern day. The album occupies that fugue state, that unsettled in-between. The voicemails were “a way of bringing fans into our world,” Armstrong goes on, “and making the real world a part of this made-up story-world that we created around the album.”

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Telenoir Radio gives us the first preview of this story-world. It’s a world of perpetual tension, in perpetual half-light. There’s white noise and crumbling walls, “the fracturing of ideas, and the overload of information, and cities – everything’s growing at such a fast pace,” Armstrong reels them off, the ideas spilling on top of each other into the chaotic jumble that the record navigates.

THE WARNING’s word cloud contains terms like “CRT, surveillance, buildings crowding in on people,” Armstrong continues, “trains rushing by, wind in your hair in the subway.” She mapped out all of this in a creative deck early on, sending it to everyone they collaborated with: the co-directors of their conceptual music videos, the designers of their social media assets. “Everyone gets sent that [deck], and that sets the tone, and that’s the world we play in,” she says.

All of those vignettes and ideas hang under the shouted, self-explanatory title, THE WARNING. And as soon as you hit go on the album, that’s what you’re hearing: the blaring synth ostinato alarm that opens “THE DEEP”, jarring you into an alert state. Like most Telenova songs, it sparked not from a chord progression or pages of prose, but a mood-based melodic fragment that they extrapolated into an epic pop tune – one that melds the deconstructed bleep-bloops of Radiohead, trip-hop’s beguiling hypnotics, and the widescreen arena-rock poise of Wolf Alice.

“Something as nuanced and miniscule as a jittering, glitching sound effect captures an emotion we were feeling just as much as a lyric,” Armstrong says, “and that seems quite consistent and coherent overall.” She appreciates the album’s thematic cohesion retroactively, as if she wasn’t cognisant during the writing process. It wasn’t until Telenova’s manager pointed out that these pulsating, siren-like motifs are a sonic throughline that Armstrong and the band realised what they’d created. It was an almost subconscious move on their part.

“We didn’t do that on purpose, but it captures exactly how we were feeling during these 18 or 24 months of being a band during this real pressure-cooker environment,” Amstrong tells me. “All the threads just came together. It’s come out in an expression that we weren’t expecting but that describes that time exactly. There was a sense of alarm and constant warning.”

For Armstrong, that two-year period is a blur. She and multi-instrumentalists Edward Quinn and Joshua Moriarty are in a stable place now. But for a while, being Telenova became untenable as the trio hurried to understand each other and the realities of being, well, Telenova following the success of their 2024 debut album, Time Is a Flower. The band didn’t form the way that bands typically do: mates from school or college or a shared grassroots scene. They were smushed together at a songwriting camp by Death Cab for Cutie alum/in-demand producer Chris Walla, back in 2020. Accordingly, their relationships had to develop in reverse: “Three strangers on our best behaviour, connected by the creative time,” as Armstrong puts it.

It can’t be easy to be vulnerable, soul-baring, and exist intimately with people whose ticks and triggers you’re still learning. In addition to all that, “It was a time in our personal lives where some of the stuff that had been fun for a little while – the drugs and the drinking – or had been kept at the fringes just started to weigh down on the friendships and become a problem,” Armstrong shares. “Also, just a clash of expectations, who we are for each other.” She explains how they’d be ‘friends’ one day and ‘bandmates’ the next, a way to justify unprofessional behaviour and bad habits – as in, we’re friends, so you’ll understand or, you’re just my bandmate, so butt out of my personal life.

The dam broke when, the night before they were due to fly to Europe for some shows, Moriarty told his friends/bandmates that he was going into rehab, like, right now. Armstrong and Quinn were relieved. “We’d been encouraging it and talking about it,” Armstrong says, “as friends, but also as bandmates whose careers and professional lives are tied up together. From all angles, it was like, this is a problem.”

In some ways, Moriarty is the middle-man in Telenova. Armstrong is a lyricist; Quinn is an instrumentalist. Moriarty does both. Armstrong’s Christian faith is central to her identity; Quinn is an atheist. But Moriarty straddles the poles. He “would come to church with me one weekend and then the next weekend he’d be on a four-day bender and look like a zombie in the studio,” Armstrong remembers. “It was this dichotomy, swinging constantly.”

And so lyrics became a way for Armstrong and Moriarty to converse indirectly – to air whatever would be too awkward or blunt if not offset by scrambled synths. It’s possible to read many of the lyrics this way: “Will it hurt me when you do the things I don’t understand?” for instance. Every line is in some way wrapped up in faith – whether it’s half-hearted (Moriarty) or whole-hearted (Armstrong) – something I’d largely overlooked until she explained, especially given many artists have a proclivity for Biblical invocations. The water-walking, the obscured signals, the frustrated conversations with an elusive force – these aren’t merely metaphorical.

I ask Armstrong to pull out the album’s most important lyric. “I cry and I curse and I scream at the heavens above / But it’s you that I want and I’ll bleed in the name of your love,” she sings during “IN THE NAME OF YOUR LOVE”. It’s a difficult one for her, almost blasphemous, she says. Regardless of one’s beliefs, Armstrong explains, “every human being has been angry at someone or something or the universe that needs to be held to account for why there’s suffering in your personal life, why there’s suffering in the world. Yelling at the sky and blaming whatever’s out there but also saying, ‘It would be nice if there’s a god’ – that tension captures a lot of the human experience. It captures the core of the conversation that Josh and I are having across the album.”

THE WARNING isn’t a Christian rock album though. Or it doesn’t have to be. It confronts the timeless push-pull of good and evil, light and dark, lost and found. The magic of pop songs is that whatever their hyper-personal origins, they end up belonging to everyone. Armstrong is obviously well aware of this, hoping fans take whatever they need from Telenova. “We’ve made a big effort from the beginning to connect with people one on one, not only as audience and band-on-stage,” she says, relishing that fans have made forever-friends or fallen in love at their shows, have found their place and people.

That’s what Telenova wanted all along: to bring everyone into their house – to face this noisy, grainy, too-busy, too-fast, perfectly imperfect world together.