INTERVIEW: Telenova release debut album 'Time Is A Flower': “There's this common theme of flowers and rebirth and longing for something that lasts forever, as opposed to something that's ephemeral”

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Photographer: Sylvie Martin
Styling: Ursula Bucek

Published: 16 August 2024

Australian three piece band Telenova, comprising lead singer Angeline Armstrong, Joshua Moriarty and Edward Quinn, first released music in 2021 after they formed at a songwriting camp. Today they reach a milestone in their career with the release of their remarkable debut album Time Is A Flower.

Throughout their career, Telenova has made a big impression with their gorgeously rich, cinematic and majestic soundscapes which mix trip-hop, trance, soul, pop and indie. Listening to their music is a truly immersive and powerful experience, and the twelve tracks on Time Is a Flower have the familiar cinematic, trip-hop base that Telenova have already made their own. However there is a clear progression in their sound, with elements of funk, disco and experimental pop liberally infused through all the tracks.

Album highlight ‘Margot’ has a driving beat mixed with light-as-a-feather vocals; its outro mixes distorted guitars and vocal echoes before ending with just a guitar and Armstrong’s voice. It brings to mind both the New Wave of the early 1980s and the experimental acid-pop of the 1960s. ‘Preamble’ takes a psychedelic sound and vibe and gives it a dirtier, darker twist, while ‘Tremors, Traces’ and ‘Discotheque Inside My Head’ bring a funkier ’60s edge to the album.

First single ‘Teardrop’ remains truest to the band’s trip-hop sound, and ‘Heaven’s Calling’ also harks back to the ’90s but leans more into indie-shoegaze. The common thread running through it all is Telenova’s mastery of melodies, a tight handle on rhythm, and their atmospheric textures that bring out the emotional nuance in the lyrics.

Title track ‘Time Is a Flower’ is a sweet, gentle pop song with infectious melodies that explores how time cannot change the way we feel about a person, even when they are no longer a part of our lives. “Oh darling, all the rivers of time couldn’t wash you away,” Armstrong sings.

Time Is a Flower, perhaps appropriately, is an album that sees Telenova truly blooming as artists. There is something incredibly special about their music. Listening to it feels like you are finally reuniting with a long-lost friend, while it also sounds like nothing you have ever heard before. This is a band that truly showcases the art of songwriting, and this is an album that is undoubtedly one of the great debut albums of 2024. Women In Pop sat down with Angeline Armstrong to find out more about the creation of this very special album.

Hi Angeline! Time Is A Flower is such a treat for the senses, it really is a full banquet. I want to start by talking about the title track which feels to be almost an outlier on the album. Talk to me about how that became the title track and how that track encompasses the whole album?
Time Is A Flower is far more about what those four words mean, than that song. That song is not going to be one of the singles, it’s not a big track that we're going out with that defines the album. It was more a contemplative reflection on when we were piecing the songs together. When we're writing, it's very free, it's like a stream of consciousness, we're not really working towards a body of work or a common theme. And when I look back over the songs that we're gravitating towards, there was just this common theme of flowers and rebirth and longing for something that kind of lasts forever, as opposed to something that's ephemeral, that kept coming up. So that lyric from that song just seemed to be the most natural fit for the album title.

I also want to talk to you about the interlude ‘Restless’ on the album? I feel like this is representing how if you're not moving and creating, it does something to, and the words that you have in 'Restless' reflect that. Is this is this collective feeling that the three of you have, this need to keep moving?
I wrote the lyrics to 'Restless', that little interlude monologue thing. There's so many different ways I can answer this. In one sense, Josh, and I write the lyrics and when we are writing, we're constantly having this dialogue about spirituality and longing and the meaning of life, through the process of writing lyrics. In that sense, it does express the mental state or existential state of us, in terms of the restlessness of wanting to put art out into the world, or constantly create and constantly be expressing. We're always writing songs, we don't go into album writing mode, we're just writing constantly throughout the year. We're all just very naturally creative people and it feels more like breathing and walking and observing. It's just a part of what we do in our natural rhythms.

Photographer: Sylvie Martin
Styling: Ursula Bucek

What I love about your music is how you play with contrasting sounds and perspectives. 'Preamble' has this kind of hedonistic slink, conservative parents of the late 60s would have just hated this song. And with ‘Margot’, because of your vocal delivery and the way you've written it, it could be so very, very different if it was sung by one of your bandmates. Is that something you intentionally do as a group, let's flip this situation on its head, let's flip this sound on its head?
Yes, we've talked a little bit about this before, as a band and also with our management in regards to what is the identity of the band, what's the voice and the contrasts. They don’t come intentionally, but we allow them to happen, and they happen naturally. Because we are three very different people from different worlds. A lot of bands form at school, or they’re friends or within the [same] neighbourhood. We met at a songwriting camp, so the only reason we were in that room together is because we were thrown in that room. We move in different circles, outside of the band, we have very different friendships, we have very different music tastes, we have very different worldviews and perspectives. There's a lot of beautiful crossover that has bonded us as friends, but I think that might be what sets us apart a little bit is that like we are just really different people from different worlds, and so that that plays out in the music in this in this constant conversation. It’s this ongoing conversation of three very different people coming together in a song.

I think that's really beautiful. And I can totally hear that. I imagine quite often, when a band comes together, there's probably an initial discussion of what's our mission statement? What are we going to sound like? But you guys had kind of like a shy toe shuffle: ‘I guess we could play some music together?’
Absolutely. I mean, for the first year, when Josh and I were writing lyrics, I don’t know if we were really talking to each other about what we were writing lyrics about, because we didn't really know each other. Music was the way that we communicated to one another as people. Now it's evolved because we tour together and you spend 24 hours with someone and you're going to grow closer in that way. But music was the way we spoke to each other at the start.

Did the the industry have a hard time putting you somewhere or knowing how to talk about you in a way because you are a trio of two men and a women, with the female as the lead singer, which is not that common in Australia. Did they have a hard time selling you in the sense of, we don't know how to pitch you?That was one of our biggest obstacles. When we were initially pitching demos to record labels, the feedback kept coming back ‘we don't know how to market this band, we don't understand’. Part of that is probably that we're not 18 year olds on TikTok, we've been in the industry for a little while, we've done other things. Initially, even us, we thought we would probably resonate with an ‘arts centre’ type audience, but it seems our audience is a lot broader, and we love it for that. But that was one of the big things, not really understanding us, and I guess that is because there's not another band in Australia that's doing a similar thing, which you think would be like, ‘hello, that's why we're exciting!’. But at the start, it was an obstacle and we had to prove ourselves. I had such a vision for the visuals, and our managers were so supportive of that, they knew I came from this background of how to market and how to create the world around what we were as a band, and that we just had to do it and prove ourselves. And the record labels came back later, ‘Okay, we get it, you're selling tickets, you have fans.’ But we had trouble communicating that at the start, people couldn't sort of see it.

Beautiful. Lastly, you've got this feast of an album, and you guys have been kicking ass, touring just everywhere. Not that I want to put any more on your shoulders. What else is coming up to you, what's getting you excited these days?
We have almost written the second album! The way we do things is the same as we've always done it, we just like what is really a gut feeling thing of what sounds, what style of guitar playing, what kind of melodies and what forms of repetition and contrast sound exciting to us at the moment. That is actually a really hard one to answer because I don't think about it, I just do it, you know? We're always writing. Songwriting is where we met, where we started. It's just what we do all the time.

Life Is A Flower is out now via EMI Music. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Telenova on Instagram and Facebook.
Read the full six page interview with Angeline Armstrong in issue 16 of Women In Pop magazine, out now.