How Tanlines Turned the Corporate Slide Deck Into a Comeback
Eight years after their last album, indie rock duo Tanlines is back with The Big Mess. But the road to this release looked nothing like their earlier work. Band member Jesse Cohen and his partner Eric Emm are now in a different phase of life, balancing families, careers, and creative ambitions. The album captures that lived tension, and its first single, "Outer Banks," does so through an unexpected lens: the corporate slide deck.
The music video for "Outer Banks" presents the song as a pitch-perfect presentation, complete with graphs, arrows, and flow charts. It is a deliberately uncomfortable mix of the banal and the personal, a format most remote workers know intimately. We spoke with Cohen about how this tongue-in-cheek approach helped the band embrace a genuinely collaborative workflow—and why playing with the language of work made the return feel natural.
A Project Made for the Remote Work Era
Tanlines began in 2008 making experimental electronic music, evolving into a pop project when Emm started singing. After their second album, Cohen took time off to be a stay-at-home dad. Life shifted, and the band released a children's record as a reflection of that period. About a year ago, Emm approached Cohen with a collection of songs that could form the next album, and Cohen traveled to rural Connecticut to help finish them.
The creative dynamic had changed completely. Where the pair once sat side by side in front of a computer, this time they were working from different locations. Cohen describes it as a remote-work-style collaboration: sending files back and forth, leaving notes, and synchronizing only when schedules allowed. Figma became a central hub for that process, used not just for planning but for moodboarding merch and storyboarding video concepts.
“It felt like it was made for creative people to make things,” Cohen says of working together in Figma across distances.
Entering the Corporate Era
During the gap between albums, Cohen entered what he jokingly calls his "corporate era," working on social teams at YouTube Music and later on the kids' brand side at Nike. He learned the rhythms of meetings and decks, which became the lingua franca of his professional life alongside remote working. That experience directly inspired the concept for the "Outer Banks" video.
Cohen's initial idea was to create a deck for every song on the album and release them as a shared folder. He asked his former coworker, Hunter Ellenbarger, who now runs his own agency, to build the first one. The result was so convincingly generic that Cohen decided it needed to be presented as a video. Where a typical corporate presentation features someone reading the text aloud from each slide, Tanlines flipped that norm: Eric singing the lyrics became their version of someone walking a room through the deck.
From Too Good to Perfectly Generic
Cohen took a first pass at the deck himself, leaning on the editorial-style presentation standards he picked up at Nike. Ellenbarger pushed back, saying the design was too polished for the joke to land. He dialed it back, stripping away refined typography in favor of the visual clichés of corporate life: insights, inspirational quotes, year-over-year comparisons, and results. The visual language needed to feel instantly recognizable, not aspirational.
The song itself was built for that framing. "Outer Banks" refers to the North Carolina beach region where Cohen has vacationed his whole life. As a band called Tanlines, they have long fielded beach comparisons, but the group has always embraced an indoor identity. This track, Cohen says, is their version of a beach song—not about parties but about memory, family, and the melancholy that sits beneath upbeat melodies. He hoped the video would resonate with his coworkers, translating a familiar professional format into a space for music and humor where they might feel seen.
Building a New Era With Old Collaborators
The broader album project brought back Teddy Blanks, an old friend and frequent collaborator who designed packaging for Tanlines earlier releases. For The Big Mess, the band brought Blanks photos taken by Emm's wife's grandfather, a professor who documented Greek folk tales and songs in the 1950s. Blanks helped shape the album's look and feel, extending it across promo posters and merch. The result marks a distinct era shift: no band member faces on the cover.
That new identity comes with healthy uncertainty. Cohen talks about aging gracefully as a goal, which for Tanlines means expressing himself as circumstances shift, obligations pile up, and creative time becomes harder to carve out. The name itself acknowledges the reality of being an artist in middle age with all of its compressed variables.
The video shoot proved a small exception to the remote process. Cohen filmed it sitting next to Emm in the same room, with music playing aloud to keep the sync tight. They hit "screen record," performed the presentation live maybe ten times, and picked the best take. The facial expressions, Cohen insists, were real—unscripted reactions from someone accustomed to wearing his emotions on the outside during remote meetings. "I was working," he jokes. Exactly.
