SEATTLE — Whether for a giant tech conglomerate or a corporate-world-skewering synth-punk band tearing it up in sweaty rock clubs, it’s good to have goals. Though it had somewhat faded over time, Alexander Barr had one when he moved to Seattle in 2009 to crack into the city’s buzzing music scene (er, attend college).

“That was kind of my goal — I want to be in a band that’s on Sub Pop,” said Barr, who sings and plays synthesizers and guitar with the band Telehealth.

Seventeen years later, mission accomplished.

Last month, Seattle’s big-little indie label announced that the synth-driven post-punks had become the latest local band to join its ranks. Formed by the wedlocked nucleus of Barr and Kendra Cox during the pandemic, when the couple started playing around with synthesizers, Telehealth’s 2023 debut “Content Oscillator” made them fast favorites in the Seattle scene, garnering word-of-mouth praise. Sub Pop is set to release the band’s bigger and brighter follow-up, “Green World Image,” on May 15, a day after Telehealth headlines a Neumos release show.

“You do it for so long, and then you’re like, ‘Eh, I don't care about that anymore, I just want to play music,’” Barr said of his back-in-the-day dream to be in a Sub Pop band. “And then as soon as it happens, you’re like, ‘Holy (expletive)!’ I hope that 14-year-old me right now would be screaming.”

When Barr and Cox learned that the venerable hometown label had agreed to put out their new album, the couple were actually working toward a far more mundane, domestic objective.

“We were on the ferry to go buy a new couch the day we got the email,” the Poulsbo-raised Cox said of the “surreal” development. “It was like this very weird situation where your dream is maybe coming true, but it took months for it to settle in and feel real. … It’s a truly huge honor to get to put that logo on the back of our album.”

Ironically, the morning of their ferry-bound sofa pursuit, Cox and Barr had started talking contingency plans in case label heads passed on “Green World Image,” which fleshes out Telehealth’s synth-fueled sound with more of a full-band approach. The relationship began in earnest three years ago at the “Content Oscillator” release show, when a Sub Pop rep passed them a business card through an intermediary with one simple question.

“At the end of the show, a friend of ours gave us our now current A&R person’s card and was like, ‘Uh, this person gave me their card and asked me if you guys are nice,’” Barr said. “I think they were checking out to make sure we weren’t (expletive).”

That tracks with Sub Pop’s longstanding informal policy that a family newspaper shall describe as “no jerks.”

“We always say we don’t work with (expletive),” Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper said. “There are a million other reasons why you maybe don’t partner with somebody, less comical ones. … But for sure we have a no (expletive) policy.”

After several years of sharing demos and get-to-know-ya hangouts at shows and Mariners games, Telehealth clearly passed the test.

“Once pen went to paper, it’s a little funny, the feeling was so ecstatic and crazy,” Cox said. “But it also felt like, ‘Oh, we’re just signing up to hang out with our buddies,’ which is really cool.”

Of course, the all-important good-hang factor doesn’t mean much if the music doesn’t genuinely resonate. Another internal policy (or maybe philosophy) Sub Pop is known for is that the label doesn’t take on artists unless the whole crew is on board.

“When people are all really excited about the music, it energizes all of us as a group,” Jasper said. “It keeps us wanting to do right by the artists. When we love their music and care about them as humans, there’s purpose to the day-to-day.”

Even as an observer not privy to their karaoke nights out, the Telehealth-Sub Pop connection feels like a Seattle match made in waterfront heaven. Much of Telehealth’s music (and really the band’s identity) is marked by a subversive sense of humor applied to the weight of living in a hypercommercialized society and social media feeds filled with doomsday headlines alongside cat memes.

Released this week, the video for Telehealth’s new single, “Things I’ve Killed,” features Cox as a self-help huckster scamming out-of-work techies after an industry collapse. It’s satirical Seattle poetry, set to an anxious, punked-up rhythm and a weirdly cathartic stream of buzzwords and industries millennials have supposedly “killed,” per a ludicrous Reddit thread.

“With the world becoming an increasingly more absurd, challenged place, they are able to … put an interesting, weird, thoughtful spin on it,” Jasper said of the band’s songwriting. “I’m speaking for myself, but in a moment where it’s easy to become angry, saddened or disheartened by how so many things are moving forward — whether that’s locally or globally — I can listen to that music and feel like there’s a sense of purpose. Also, there’s a sense of levity because they address a lot of the contradictions and the absurdity in a way that can be smart, funny and also kinda beautiful.”

As Barr, a designer who studied architecture in grad school, explainedit, it’s a simple “write what you know” approach, “reflections of what we see and experience on a hyperlocal scale.”

“We live in such an intertangled community and society these days that our songs kind of embody how that feels — how it might feel to doomscroll for 20 minutes,” he said. “You’ve got drone footage, but you’ve also got happy dogs and food content. Sometimes it makes you feel amazing, and other times you feel dreadful. That’s how we live.”

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