“Southern Progress” is the new single from queer / transfemme metal band Flummox. The song is out Oct. 11.
Flummox has been featured previously at Revolver, Decibel, Metal Injection, Prog, Everything Is Noise & more. The band runs metal’s sonic gamut, blending prog, doom, thrash, symphonic thrash, mathcore, blackened death metal and a good bit of Mr. Bungle-style eccentricity. “Southern Progress” follows suit as a jaw-dropping mission statement, taking everything the band does well, smashing it together in a particle collider and cranking the volume.
The track was recorded by Jason Dietz (Amigo The Devil, Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, Hank Williams III), with vocals & extra overdubs completed at Judas Priest guitarist Richie Faulkner’s home studio in Nashville. It’s a scathing, autobiographical song that deals with musical & spiritual growth. The band’s forthcoming album—also called Southern Progress—expands on this, delving into the band members’ religiously oppressed upbringing, the police state, capitalism, apathy and uncovering & undoing buried trauma.
Their sound is often described as genre-fluid, Flummox runs metal’s sonic gamut, blending prog, doom, thrash, symphonic thrash, mathcore and blackened death metal with a healthy dose of Mr Bungle-style eccentricity. New single “Southern Progress”—the title track from the queer / trans femme Nashville band’s forthcoming album (out spring 2025 on Needlejuice Records)—follows suit as a jaw-dropping mission statement, taking everything Flummox does well, smashing it together in a particle collider and cranking the volume.
“I usually work on my songs for months, even years before completion,” says bassist/lead singer Alyson Blake Dellinger. “But with ‘Southern Progress’ I wrote most 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 being subtle where it needs to be.”
“It’s very bombastic,” says guitarist Max Mobarry. “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, “Southern Progress” is a scathing, autobiographical song about personal development and musical & spiritual growth. “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 character development.”
The new album expands on themes introduced in the “Southern Progress” single, delving into the band members’ religiously oppressed 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. The whole reason I started playing music in the first place was to put my feelings into it. I’ve always written what I know, what I experience. Making an album is cheaper than therapy!”
Southern Progress was recorded by Jason Dietz (Amigo The Devil, Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, Hank Williams III) at Twin Oak Studios, with vocals & 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 & Mobarry, Flummox is guitarist Chase McCutcheon, keyboardist Jesse Peck and drummer Alan Pfeifer. This go-round, for the first time, the band was able to road test and refine the songs live before recording them.
“Our audiences have seen us perform all of these songs,” Mobarry says. “There are all these bootlegs out there to where people are excited to hear the new studio versions.”
“Since our last record, we’ve been touring our asses off—just anywhere and everywhere,” Dellinger says. “It’s been a blessing to have a band where we’re all getting along, all gelling, and all have the same sense of purpose.”
The cover art for Southern Progress—created by artist Paige Weatherwax, who also worked with the band on previous albums Rephlummoxed and Intellectual Hooliganism—distils 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 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 will 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.”
