Telltale: Addiction, Mental Health & Grunge-Pop

Since becoming a band back in 2017, Virginia-based TELLTALE never really felt like the time was right to release an album. “We never really had a cohesive body of work large enough to dictate putting out an album,” explains vocalist John Carteret while on the highway to play a show in Boston.

“When we went in to record what ended up becoming our first EP, it was supposed to be an album – that was the seven songs from that EP plus the three singles that we released afterward. After leaving the studio, we just realised that it wasn’t meant to be an album.”

The band followed this with a series of successful singles and EPs, amassing hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. Their fan-favourite track Rose has garnered over nine million plays alone, contributing to some seriously impressive streaming numbers. However, May 2024 marks the release date of the band’s first full-length album, a self-titled effort, and it’s some of their best work yet.

“It really just feels like the timing was finally right for it,” John explains. “I think we’re very locked in on what we want to do, what we want to sound like, what we want it to look like. It feels like the truest representation of what I personally and what I think my guys have wanted to make, as a part of this band. I think we made the right choices at the time with putting out content in the way that we did, and now we can confidently put out an album and self-title it at that. I feel like it’s almost a bit conceited, almost a bit narcissistic to do so, but for me, it’s really just the confidence in what we’re putting out.”

Released via Rude Records, TELLTALE’s self-titled album is much more fine-tuned and well-prepared than previous releases have been, and a lot of time and effort has gone into making it perfect. Since the pandemic and its subsequent years, the band have been learning to use recording software, allowing them to properly demo beforehand which is something that they’d never been able to do before. “For previous EP’s, we would typically just go in with a short 15 second riff or maybe just a single line for a hook that we think is clever and catchy, but this time we went in with 15 or 20 full demos, plus some short ideas on top of that,” John explains. “We definitely came in more prepared this time. Just very, very ready to go, already knowing what it is we wanted to make. Some of the songs first came to be during Lie Your Way Out (2022), but didn’t make it out of that EP because we were like, ‘oh, I can see this being on an album’, but we didn’t want to make an album at that point in time. So we just took our time with it.”

In terms of the writing process, John’s particularly grateful for the power of technology, which allowed them to put the tracks together cohesively despite members of the band living a 10 hours drive away from each other. “We all work in software called Logic Pro, and they’ve got this really great little cloud feature. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and they live on the coast in Virginia, so we just sent it back and forth via the internet and just kind of bounced it around until we got it where we wanted it to be,” he explains.

While everyone has their own roles within the band, he explains that if there was something someone particularly wanted to say with a song, the band allowed for that to happen, and Cardinals is a track that John states is lyrically more Bryce [Marshall, guitars] and Tim [Fogg, bass] than himself. However, Telltale is mainly an album about John’s personal struggles and navigating his own mental health. “We’ve always been a band that talks about mental health, but as of recently my own mental health journey has manifested with various problems with devices, and just personal struggles,” he explains. “I think the album is just a rise and fall narrative around that, but as told through some darker imagery. And then on the visual side, the Poe references in cohesion with our name, we wanted it to be very self-referential, so using tropes of Gothic literature to tell a story of addiction and overcoming that.”

Sound-wise, Telltale was influenced by a combination of both 00’s post-grunge and a modern, poppy sound. John notes that influences range from POST MALONE and THE WEEKND to BREAKING BENJAMIN and SEETHER, and these are the two worlds that collide on the album. “We’ve been going for this genre of grunge pop,” he explains. “There’s the very grungy instrumentals with that pop polish on top, so it’s both raw and polished at the same time; bipolar.”

TELLTALE‘s summer gigs are already set, and while an autumn tour remains tentative, it promises to be a more extensive run. The band are also eyeing up a trip to the UK in the near future. “How do I how do I put this delicately without offending my American counterparts? Like y’all are just so much nicer than us. So much nicer. Like, everybody treated us with just so much kindness, and it was just such a joy,” John explains when describing what it was like to be touring the UK back in 2023. However sadly, we shouldn’t expect their return to this side of the pond until at least 2025.

With such an astounding discography already under their belt and a full-length album now added to this, TELLTALE are definitely one to look out for as their future remains incredibly bright.

Telltale is out now via Rude Records.

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