Green World Image opens with [user onboarding sequence] as a smooth, corporate voice promises a beautiful utopian future that fuses nature with technology and wellness. The future is here, and it’s called Telehealth. If you don’t understand that this is a joke, then the album would read as a LinkedIn wet dream. If you do get the joke, and you will, then Green World Image will be one of the funniest records you’ll hear all year.

Seattle five-piece Telehealth present themselves as a music startup with a bio that reads like something generated by a corporate communications algorithm trained on TED talks, with their Sub Pop deal framed as an IPO. The whole album carries a Truman Show quality of hyper-perfection and total unreality with a gleaming surface of tech, wellness and hustle presented with a straight face and a knowing grin. The music is gloriously fun with DEVO as the most obvious touchstone. Punk that’s more interested in dancing and satire than blind range and destruction, New Wave was always focussed on making you laugh while making you think and Telehealth are now operating in a world that’s way more plagued by gadgets, propaganda and scams than anything DEVO and Oingo Boingo could have ever imagined.

The band are committed to live performance first, getting sweaty whilst using samplers and electronic gadgets with a rejection of backing tracks and sanitisation even as they embrace a full arsenal of electronic weirdness. The vocal interplay and male-female partnership between Alexander Attitude and Kendra Cox is central to everything, giving the record a unique character that’s split-your-sides funny. Silver Spoon is about having everything handed to you, Cool Job is about the absurdity of a career defined entirely by buzzwords and vibes, and Yassify Me reels off modern Gen Z slang with the same glee of Frank Zappa’s Valley Girl and a whole lexicon of TikTok meaninglessness rattled off at speed.

Villain Era riffs on therapy speak and self-indulgent narcissism, and the album as a whole is designed to not make much sense precisely because so much of the world right now doesn’t make any sense with the language of every pop-up that interrupts your browsing and every sidebar that screams for your attention workshopped by a corporation to within an inch of its life. Green World Image is just as ridiculous as all of that nonsense.

Viagra Boys have been using modern slang and cultural references to perfectly encapsulate the hellscape we find ourselves in into a brilliant rock and roll party, and Frankie and the Witch Fingers did it magnificently on Trash Classic. Telehealth have arrived to add their voice to an exciting wave of bands who’ve realised that new wave was a genius movement that now has all sorts of new political and technological material to mine.

In a world of horrible scams and faked authenticity, and an internet built by people pretending to be successful, Telehealth are considerably more affable than their competition.