All throughout their new album Green World Image, Seattle post-punks Telehealth pull off a brilliant pastiche of B-52s-style party-time new wave, weaving their oblong neon punk-funk grooves full of extremely topical lyrics about the plight of living in our degraded modern culture. There's more than a little Devo in their sound and their worldview. You heard it in action on "Things I've Killed," an absolute riot on which they rattled off a list of entities supposedly killed off by millennials: "Baseball/ Golf course/ Mayonnaise/ Credit score," and so on. And we hear it again today on "Yassify Me," the final advance single before the album drops tomorrow.
"Yassify" is, of course, an extremely online term for applying over-the-top beauty filters to a human portrait until it becomes something unnerving and hyperreal. "Yassify Me" finds Telehealth riding a gnarly bassline straight into the dark heart of our optimized, commercialized reality, commenting on the way so many alleged improvements instead end up leading us somewhere hollow and grotesque. The band's Kendra Cox directed the video, which features Seattle artist Becky Harbine getting her groove on around some of the city's most gentrified areas. Cox explains:
What you see is pretty much what you get here. "Yassify Me" is the result of a zero-dollar budget, a dream, and my aunt Becky absolutely committing to the bit. Watching her improvised movements against the backdrop of rapid development somehow captured the exact juxtaposed spirit of the song better than anything we could’ve planned. Go Mariners!
Watch below.
Green World Image is out 5/15 on Sub Pop.
