Flummox turn it up and tear it up on their unstoppable funk-rock freakout Always Something Going Down — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
For the latest preview of their upcoming album Southern Progress, the Nashville nonconformists handily live up to their handle with a wild three-ring wing-ding that will leave the uninitiated bemused, baffled and bewildered — not to mention solidly blown away. Fuelled by blazing boogie-rock axe riffage, driven by a hard-bouncing groove that veers in and out of 11/8, and laced with punchy organ, blistering basslines, squiggling synthesizers and layer upon layer of left-field lunacy, this brain-busting track smartly smacks the sweet spot between mid-’70s Frank Zappa, Mr. Bungle, Primus and King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard. Rock, metal, prog, psych, funk, boogie, jam-rock; you name it, it’s in here somewhere — and all in service of the central lyrical message: It don’t matter what goes up; it only matters what comes down.
Allow dynamic singer-bassist Alyson Blake Dellinger to explain and enlighten: “Always Something Going Down is an ode to apathy. It’s a song that addresses a lot of modern life’s inherent bullshit while not exactly providing any answers to the problem — but at least it’s got a ring to it. This is one of the first ones we wrote for this new album. It was an attempt to write something a little more poppy amidst the rest of a rather dark-tinted record. It just needed something easy that grooves in between the disgusting metal riffs and somewhat downer themes that are all over Southern Progress.”
Indeed, the album — due April 11 — dishes up a hefty, hearty bowl of heavy emotional and personal berries. Topics on tap include the bandmembers’ oppressive religious upbringing, the police state, capitalism, apathy and buried trauma. “There’s a Venn diagram of buried trauma that the whole band shares,” Dellinger says. “We’re able to help each other in that regard, to dissect that. The new record also gets into undoing some of the trauma, just by writing about it. Really, the whole reason I started playing music in the first place was to put my own feelings into it. I’ve always written what I know, what I experience. Making an album is cheaper than therapy!”
Previous single Executive Dysfunction was inspired by “a common symptom of ADHD and neurodivergence of multiple kinds,” Dellinger says. “Basically, it’s when your brain locks you in place — like, you know you have a lot of work that needs to be done, but whatever it is in your brain that allows you to prioritize tasks, focus and get things done shuts down completely. And you’re completely aware of it. It’s definitely something that anybody who has ADHD has experienced, and it’s something I wanted to write about, because it’s one of the main characteristics of my own neurodivergence, and it’s been a big hindrance for my mental health. So the song really comes from a place of vulnerability.”
Adds guitarist Max Mobarry: “With Flummox, we’re known for songs like Trans Girls Need Guns that lyrically deal with social issues, but Executive Dysfunction speaks to something more introspective. It’s the battle that’s happening within — an anthem for when your greatest obstacle is yourself.”
Then there’s the title track, a scathing, autobiographical number about personal development and musical / spiritual growth. “I usually work on my songs for months, even years before completion,” says Dellinger. “But with Southern Progress, I wrote the majority of the arrangement in half an hour. Sonically, it encompasses the entire new album in the way we shift genres, and how intense and in-your-face the music is, while also being subtle where it needs to be.” Says Mobarry: “It’s very bombastic. This song was our clear choice for a lead single. It just lays waste to everything; it’s a portent of the madness to come as the record unfolds — four solid minutes that represent how far we’ve come as a band.”
Lyrically, “the song plays into this rock-star trope,” Dellinger says, “while also pointing the finger back at myself and asking, ‘Don’t you think it’s a little cringe, the way you represent yourself?’ A lot of what we do is very queer and, unfortunately, autobiographical. Southern Progress is a flip on the fact that I’m from the South, that this is a Southern band, and we’re progressing not just musically, but also spiritually and within our own character development.”
Southern Progress was recorded by Jason Dietz (Amigo The Devil, Hank Williams III) at Twin Oak Studios, with vocals and extra overdubs completed at Judas Priest guitarist Richie Faulkner’s home studio in Nashville. The album was mastered by Jamie King (Between the Buried and Me, Scale the Summit). In addition to Dellinger and Mobarry, Flummox includes guitarist Chase McCutcheon, keyboardist Jesse Peck and drummer Alan Pfeifer. This go-round, for the first time ever, the band were able to road-test and refine the songs live before recording them.
The cover art for Southern Progress — created by artist Paige Weatherwax, who also worked with the band on previous albums Rephlummoxed and Intellectual Hooliganism — distills the essence of the record. It features an illustration of a menacing pastoral scene with a tornado bearing down on a farmhouse as a rattlesnake, fangs bared, wraps itself around what has become Flummox’s spirit animal: The opossum.
“We’re the opossum band — possumcore,” Dellinger says. “At this point, the opossum is for us what Eddie is for Iron Maiden. And I’ve always been fascinated with tornados — I’ve actually lived through a couple. That’s something that happens in the South, surviving F4 tornadoes. The idea with this cover, though, and how it relates to the record is that you have all of these elements that are symbols of the South, and each comes to represent renewal. The barn is in the path of the tornado, so it’s going to be cleared away. And on the flip side of the album cover, the opossum has won the fight and it’s eating the serpent. But it’s not some ‘South will rise again’ confederate shit. It came from something I heard one of the Tennessee Three state legislators, representative Justin Jones, say that stuck with me: ‘The South will rise anew.’ And that’s how I’ve conceptualized this record.”
Get down to Always Something Going Down above, hear more from Flummox below, and don’t even think about playing possum on their website, Instagram, Bluesky and Tiktok.
