Tennessee-based five-piece Flummox have been bewildering and amazing listeners with their genre-defying blend of progressive metal, doom, math rock, thrash, symphonic metal, and blackened death metal for over a decade, and are gearing up for the release of their new album, Southern Progress, for spring 2025. Today, we’re incredibly excited to share the brand new title track from this album with you!
Much like the song, let’s get straight to it: “Southern Progress” is an absolute trip. In just four minutes, Flummox manage to put together a mind-bending collision of influences. Equal measures Judas Priest, Norway’s Shining, Devin Townsend, Dream Theater, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Mr. Bungle, with a healthy dose of rock’n’roll attitude and Protest The Hero intensity, “Southern Progress” is a wholly unique musical potion flavoured with sass. Right from the get-go, the song is explosively confrontational – high-octane fast-car thrash riffing drenched in glam and glitter; bombastic, fierce, raunchy, and totally unapologetic. I feel there has never been a band more aptly named.
Lyrically, by the band’s own admission, “Southern Progress” is largely autobiographical. Vocalist Alyson Blake Dellinger dissects the band’s trauma, much of which stems from the members’ religiously oppressed upbringings, and how that, paired with being a queer band from the South, caused them to act in certain ways. Looking back now, Dellinger says, ‘The song plays into this rock-star trope, while also pointing the finger back at myself and asking, ‘Don’t you think it’s a little cringe, the way you represent yourself?’’.
The explicitly sexual opening verse gives way to an incredibly short, but no less intense chorus, featuring the brilliant line ‘Daddy don’t like my rock n roll because I had to sell more than just my soul’. If there’s one thing “Southern Progress” is not, it’s subtle. You won’t find any veiled metaphors here – Flummox say it as it is, presenting their experiences with unequivocal clarity. The song feels very much like a cathartic journey to self-acceptance and personal growth, something that the band strive to achieve on their upcoming album.
The new album expands on themes introduced in this song, delving into the band members’ relationships with religion, the police state, capitalism, apathy and buried trauma. Dellinger elaborates:
‘There’s a Venn diagram of buried trauma that the whole band shares. 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!’
No doubt “Southern Progress” has piqued your interest – keep an eye out for more singles, pre-orders, and other Flummox shenanigans through their Bandcamp page and various social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok). A new album is on the horizon for spring 2025, mastered by the legendary modern progster Jamie King – until then, stay weird, folks!
