Telehealth
Green World Image
SUB POP
Millennials, are we still sore about the avocado toast thing? 2026 marks 10 years since a columnist for The Australian first identified brunch spending as the obstacle between a whole generation and home ownership, spawning a joke that, unlike the real estate market, will never die. You could argue that it gets more grimly comic the longer the actual problem persists; per the National Association of Realtors, the median age of first-time home-owners rose to 40 in 2025. That’s an all-time high, and the upper end of the Millennial age range, so I can’t really fault Seattle new wave band Telehealth for iterating on a decade-old meme in “Silver Spoon.” After the saxophone intro, co-vocalist Kendra Cox announces, “Baby, I cannot afford / Avocado toast / Anymore,” with staccato snark typical of the post-punk genre.
Avocado is just one of many greens that color Telehealth’s second record and Sub Pop debut, Green World Image. Sometimes they mean “green” as in sustainable, but usually it refers to cash; this is a vision of a world financialized to within an inch of its life. Starting with the album’s intro track, styled as an onboarding video voiceover—all corporate jargon over sentimental keys and sampled applause—Green World Image mashes up Millennial malaise with ’80s synthpunk and Office Space’s workplace satire. Telehealth established the aesthetic on their 2023 debut Content Oscillator, in which frontman Alexander Attitude played every part while Cox provided auxiliary vocals. On Green World Image, they’re back as a quintet bankrolled by one of the world’s cheekiest labels. From the packaging to the production to a bio straight out of r/LinkedInLunatics, the result is, ironically, a triumph of branding.
Telehealth realize the platonic ideal of new-wave pastiche, complete with vocoders, chorused bass, and cowbell rhythms. “Cost of Inaction” stands out with its anxious dance instruction chorus (“Gotta break it, gotta move / Gotta shake it, gotta groove”) and drums that pound like they’re trying to smash through the walls of the rigid beat. Cox and Attitude’s mocking lyrics complete the effect: “Donor Country (A gOoD cAuSe)” skewers conscious consumerism, rhyming “calling the cops” with "artisanal hops,” while the venomously catchy “Villain Era” parodies the girl-bossification of online speech (“Girl / Like / Queen / Like / Slay / Like / Preach / Like!”). Not everything lands on target, though, even beyond the tired lines about industries Millennials have allegedly killed. On “Yassify Me,” their satire of performativity just sounds like conservative bile: “S-J-dub / ACLU / Glow it up, baby / Change your pronouns, too.”
The instrumentals are uniformly fun, but terminally online, irony-poisoned humor tends to crowd out the more emotional parts of Content Oscillator. Sometimes, like all of us, Telehealth need to touch green. On closer “Living, Laughing, Loving, Trying,” Attitude acknowledges the comments and reviews comparing his band to Devo, and facetiously admits to ripping them off. Maybe the observation wouldn’t be so easy if he didn’t deliver so many lyrics in the same clipped cadence as “Whip It.” Unlike satirical and synthy peers who’ve drawn the same reference (such as their new labelmates Sweeping Promises), Telehealth lack the bespoke, earnest eccentricity that elevates a band above their sound-alikes—something to consider before the next performance review.
