INTERVIEW: Telenova release new EP 'Stained Glass Love': "The five songs on this EP can be traced to a very specific and key turning point in my life that has defined who I am today."
Image: Clint Peloso
Telenova are a three piece band based in Melbourne. Headed by lead singer and writer Angeline Armstrong and backed by multi-instrumentalists Edward Quinn and Joshua Moriarty, the band formed in 2020, releasing their debut single ‘Bones’ in 2021.
Today they release their remarkable second EP, Stained Glass Love. Preceded by the singles ‘Scarlet’, ‘Haunted’ and ‘Why Do I Keep You?’ the EP is made up by some of the most perfectly created pop music you are likely to hear in 2022. Lush, deep and utterly hypnotic it is exactly what music dubbed ‘cinematic’ sounds like.
The EP traverses through a number of genres without being beholden to any. Opening track ‘Scarlet’ is reminiscent of 1990s UK trip hop, with it’s tinkling piano and muffled beat before giving way to a powerful guitar chorus. ‘Haunted’, with its driving beats, brings a touch of Northern Soul interspersed with electronica and synth. With wonderfully gothic lyrics, it tells a story of being addicted to the one you love even though you know it will end badly. “Go on and take my hand and lead me up to the altar…And then you draw the knife / And dance with me softly, darling / Pierce it through my heart”.
First single ‘Why Do I Keep You?’ remains as fresh as ever with it’s indiepop crossed with electronica, while ‘Silver Linings’, which tells of the nostalgia and melancholy that comes with moving on, has a woozy, synth and trip hop feeling.
The EP closes with a message of rebirth on the title track ‘Stained Glass Love’. Set against a soundscape that gradually adds more and more layers before exploding in the chorus, Armstrong’s vocal ebbs and flows through different moods before ending in a high pitched whisper.
Stained Glass Love can easily lay claim to one of the best EPs of the year. Expertly produced with gorgeous melodies and an immersive soundscape, Telenova sound exactly like your favourite music while sounding nothing like it, and it is this uniqueness and beauty that makes it something you will want to return to again and again.
We recently caught up with Armstrong to find out more about the band and the creation of Stained Glass Love.
Hi Angeline! So good to chat to you. How is everything in your world right now?
We just kicked off our Australian and NZ tour for Stained Glass Love so life is definitely amping up again! Can be easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of it all, but when I step back and take a look at the world I’m in right now, it’s pretty wonderful really. I get to play music with my friends, create all kinds of art within this project and I live in a little apartment with great afternoon sun and an indoor forest of houseplants with the love of my life. So life’s good.
Congratulations on the release of your new EP Stained Glass Love. It is such a brilliant EP, can you talk me through a bit of the background to the EP and the inspiration behind it? What, if any, was the message you wanted to project with it?
We didn’t really set out with the aim of threading a particular ‘message’ through the EP, but I think the beauty of being able to create a body of work within a particular time period means that inevitably there’s going to be a bit of a narrative thread or tone that’s very specific to your life situation regardless of whether you intended it to be that way or not. That’s definitely the case for me with Stained Glass Love. Sonically, we were conscious of exploring some different sounds with the title track being extremely guitar-heavy and wanting it to move between multiple ‘scene’ changes - in the same way our debut single ‘Bones’ does. Lyrically, we were right in the heart of Melbourne’s seemingly never-ending lockdowns when we started writing the songs and I, like most, was hyper introspective at the time. All that time alone at home to get stuck in the echo of your own head. Retrospectively, I realise now that every one of the five songs on this EP can be traced to a very specific and key turning point in my life that has defined who I am today. So I like to call this EP a ‘coming of age’ of sorts. The first four songs on the record, ‘Scarlet’, ‘Why Do I Keep You?’, ‘Haunted’ and ‘Silver Lining’ are all centred on an experience of hurt, pain or longing. Times of brokenness. In contrast, ‘Stained Glass Love’ is pretty triumphant as a finale track. To me, that song has a deeply spiritual significance of a vision I had several years ago that kind of felt like a ‘scooping up’ of all the broken bits in my life and a piecing together of a new self.
As you said, much of this EP was written in the long Melbourne Covid lockdowns, what was the creative process like making music during such an intense period?
It was a funny time for us as a band - the two boys were a little looser with their adherence to the rules. So I’d only really be in the studio with them whenever restrictions loosened, and they’d have some fresh beats and musical ideas to show me, which I’d then sing melodies over and start to form lyrical ideas. I actually can’t say how long this EP took to write, probably somewhere between six months to a year, with a bunch of other demos written in between and fortunately for us, some occasional touring between lockdowns to tour our debut EP Tranquilize. Other than the first song we ever wrote together at a songwriting camp, we’ve written every song since then, upstairs of Josh’s house where he’s got a lovely little light-filled home studio. Lucky us.
We recorded this EP at the Base Studios in South Melbourne with engineer Phil Threfall and had it mixed by Cam Parkin. They’re both absolute legends. We don’t usually work with an additional songwriter or producer because we’ve kind of got every base covered in house with Josh and Ed both being producers and playing multiple instruments. ‘Haunted’ is the one track where we had the pleasure of working with Styalz Fuego (Mallrat, Troy Sivan, The Knocks) on some additional production and re-writing the chorus. We’d sat with an older chorus for so long and Styalz had a crack at a new (much hookier!) version which we all (eventually) fell in love with. It’s cool to learn from other producers/writers, so it might be something we do a little more of down the line, who knows.
One thing that really stands out on this EP is the absolutely gorgeous soundscape - it is really quite beautiful. Cinematic, immersive with hints of multiple genres without being a slave to any in particular. Without wanting to put Telenova into a box, how do you describe the Telenova sound?
You’d think after all the times I’ve been asked this over the last year I’d know how to do this by now! I’d say the genre-crossing thing is super pertinent to our sound and the natural culmination of our unique musical tastes and musical backgrounds as band members. Trip hop is a helpful niche genre to describe us I think - Portishead, Massive Attack, Moby, that sort of thing. I’ve heard ‘art pop’ used as well, which I like. I’d say we’ve generally got hip hop beats, with 60s/70s influenced chords and musicality, with more of a folk/literary bent to the lyric writing than traditional pop songs. Soundtrack music is pretty influential over the ambient and synth and string sections we write. But we also love a hooky chorus, so most of the songs thus far do tend towards a pop structure.
One of my favourite tracks on the EP is fourth track ‘Silver Lining’, it has this really cool late-1990s trip hop feel to it. Can you talk me through this track and the inspiration behind it?
Oh awesome! I’m so glad that track stands out to you - it’s a particularly special song to me. The lyrics came really quickly for ‘Silver Lining’ - the boys had started laying down those dreamy shimmery chords on acoustic guitar and that trip hop beat, and it conjured this memory of me looking out the plane window when I moved back to Melbourne from Los Angeles and being so stunned by how such a significant and massive chapter of my life, this entire world of people and places and experiences, was sinking away below the plane window, till it was as small as a tiny little bug that I could squash between my fingertips. There’s so much longing and immediate nostalgia in those chords. I wanted to write a love letter to Los Angeles with that song - embodying the whole crazy heartbeat of that city that I’d fallen in love with and that had changed me, giving the city a sense of ‘personhood’ in the final moments of a weighty goodbye. ‘I’ve got your number in my pocket, said I’d call you up before I pay the cheque / I’ve got your memory in my suitcase, said I’d leave it waiting by the desk / Leave me hanging my a thread, wrapped around your fingertips’. The ‘Silver Lining’ title is a double metaphor - for how nostalgia for times-gone-by can hang onto us and entangle like the thin, silver tendrils of a spider web…but how there’s also a ‘silver lining’ to the sadness of a farewell, for without it we wouldn’t have the growth and the change and the purpose that came with that time.
For those who are new to Telenova, how did the band come together?
We met at an APRA SongHubs Songwriting Camp a couple years ago - which is basically where you get selected alongside a bunch of musicians and producers, and every day get thrown in the studio with a different group of people (often strangers) and you’ve gotta write a song in a day. Our particular camp was curated by Chris Walla from Death Cab for Cutie, and Ed, Josh and I ended up in a room together on Day 4. We wrote ‘Tranquilize’ in one day, all got really excited about that. And then kept writing together for several weeks and months after the camp, until we naturally sort of realised we were all friends and should just call this thing a band now. Very cute.
And what was your personal journey in music? How did you get to where you are today?
For the majority of my life I’ve wrestled with having far too many creative interests - all of which are incredibly ‘risky’, ‘unstable’ and unpredictable career paths. For the most part, I was pursuing a career in filmmaking and writing, and music was the beloved hobby that kept me sane by expressing all my pent up emotions through sad folk songs that I’d strum away at in my bedroom. I had the pleasure of being in several bands with friends over the years, mainly folk/indie folk vibes, we’d write and play shows, but it wasn’t anything particularly ‘serious’. I moved to LA hoping to land a job as a PA in a film production company and eventually climb the ladder to becoming a showrunner or work in scripted development (big dreams lol) but ended up making movies with friends, hanging out with musicians, and working on my first, I guess, ‘professional music’ project with a brilliant Australian electronic pop producer called Jarrad Rogers who was living over there. We actually had a go at a creative project for a year that didn’t quite pan out as either of us had hoped, but I learnt a lot from Jarrad and that experience about the nature of the industry, doing music as more than just a hobby, and songwriting and production stuff too.
I’m really grateful to have had all of all those experiences over the years - Telenova definitely feels like ‘I’ve arrived’ I guess. Not sure I know exactly what that phrase means or how to use it! But this is the first time that the music, and performing that music, feels the truest to me.
Who were the artists that you were into and inspired you when you were growing up?
I was a big 2000s indie fan. Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, The Strokes, The National, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Lana Del Rey, Radiohead…I loved musicians and bands that had a real world around the music, sonically but also aesthetically. I also was a big fan of dad’s U2 CDs, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, the Bee Gees - I listen to those less these days, but no doubt they’ve shaped me in some way.
You are, of course, the sole female in the band and in recent years we have seen women speak out about the dangers they face just by existing in the music industry, both physically mentally and artistically. On top of that, female musicians have traditionally not been given the same respect as male musicians - by the industry, the media and the general public. What are your thoughts on gender equality and sexism in the music industry?
I think it’s a rough time out there for a lot of women and non-binary people, there’s still a lot of work to do, even though there’s certainly the perception of things changing for the better in certain areas. I think real permanent change comes down to women not being the only ones fighting for change. I personally have been really fortunate, for the most part, to have been surrounded with kind, respectful, encouraging musicians and industry people in my experiences thus far - both men, women and non-binary alike. I’m still processing some of the rarer moments in my past where I felt status imbalances or like I wasn’t quite heard - and how much of that was to do with sexism, how much was to do with a perception that I was young and inexperienced (and therefore perceived as “clueless”), how much was to do with my own lack of confidence, how much was just ego and pride of the other party. I’m still figuring some of that out. Outside of the systematic change that’s occurring in the biz though - I feel like I’m on a pretty personal journey with it all.
To be honest with you, like the more this whole music thing is a career, and the more you’re in the sort of ‘business’/industry side of things as well, and the more your personal life becomes enveloped in your career, I start to become aware of socio-cultural expectations that have made their way into how I relate and function as a woman - just like a tendency to underestimate my skillset, to always think everyone else is doing me a favour, to constantly feel the need to prove myself in spaces where I witness my male counterparts just having that testosterone confidence or whatever it is, to think they’re the best in the room - I’m not talking about my band by the way! They’re legends that happily call me ‘the boss’ on a regular basis! I do feel very empowered, challenged and inspired by the women and non-binary people in my industry who are speaking out. I think all of our personal journeys alongside the rallying for systematic change are inextricably linked with positive change. But yeah, since the first waves of feminism women have carried the majority of the burden in pushing for change and gender equality, and I really doubt things will truly change until men and women alike are seriously looking at their own individual hearts to really examine what motivates our behaviour and perceptions of the ‘other’. I think hearts have to change. Not just systems.
Stained Glass Love is out, and you’ve got a lot of shows coming up to round off the year. What else is on the cards for Telenova in 2022?
Yeah well, in and around the Australian & NZ Tour and a crazy festival season of Falls, Spilt Milk, Lost Paradise and a bunch of others over the summer, we’re super excited to be finishing off writing the debut album. So so keen to put out a solid body of songs, as we’ve just done two 5-track EPs up until now. And I can’t wait to start dreaming up the visual world of artwork and music videos and photoshoots and everything around all of that for the debut album! We’ll be busy. But our fans are seriously the loveliest bunch, especially meeting everyone on tour, they give us a lot of energy to keep at it.
Stained Glass Love is out now via Pointer Recordings / Remote Control Records. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Telenova you can follow them on Instagram and Facebook.
STAINED GLASS LOVE EP TOUR Tickets on-sale now via www.telenovamusic.com.au
Supported by Skeleten
19 August - Tuning Fork, Auckland NZ
20 August - Meow, Wellington NZ
23 September - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
24 September - Uni Bar, Wollongong
30 September - Mojos, Perth
1 October - Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
8 October - The Brightside, Brisbane
21 October - 170 Russell, Melbourne
UPCOMING FESTIVAL APPEARANCES
26 November - Spilt Milk, Canberra ACT
3 December - Spilt Milk, Ballarat VIC
4 December - Spilt Milk, Gold Coast QLD
29 December - Lost Paradise, Glenworth Valley NSW
31 December - Falls Festival, Murroon, VIC
2 January - Falls Festival, Byron Bay, NSW
7 January - Falls Festival, Fremantle, WA
