flipturn

Hi Noah 
How’s it going? 
Would you be up for coming to see flipturn next week?

This was the intro of the first email I opened once I’d arrived at 787 Coffee on Pearl St. in NYC one weekday this past November, ordered an iced vanilla latte, and sat down at my corner table. As per usual, the drink is good, not great, and the place was buzzing with local FiDi business folk on a midday break.

I was unfamiliar with the band flipturn, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the invite was for shows in London. The publicist, having caught my work on a UK-based platform, assumed I was from the area. Alas, I wouldn’t be making it over.

Three weeks later, I’m back at 787 and have flipturn’s then unreleased album Burnout Days, in my inbox.

For tracks 1-5, I’m passively invested. For all four minutes and nine seconds of track six, called “Right?,” I’m on another planet and I don’t even realize it as the song is crashing in around me through my headphones. I tense up, eyes glued to nothing, head lightly bobbing up and down, and my internal monologue is explicit and disorderly. When it ends, I come to. “Fuck, I hope no one saw that,” I thought.

I spend the next two hours watching live performances of Fernandina Beach, FL-based band flipturn, made up of Dillon Basse (vocals), Madeline Jarman (bass), Tristan Duncan (lead guitar), Mitch Fountain (guitar, synthesizers), and Devon VonBalson (drums, percussion). Their midday set at 2024’s ACL Festival was particularly stirring, with heavy focus on VonBalson’s magnified intensity behind the kit and Basse’s leisurely-yet-calculated crowd control and undeniable vocal flexibility. Further observations determined that each member of flipturn equally contributes to the cohesiveness of the band, poetically displaying their individual tricks and methods of musical and emotional connectivity.

Months later, I sat down for an in-person interview with the five-piece in their green room at NYC’s Terminal 5 ahead of a sold-out show. The members squeezed onto the two compact corner room couches, but were enabled to dive into the nuances of their latest record and the framework of their unit.

What makes flipturn tick, at least from a visual perspective, are the keen understandings each of the five members have of their roles within it. Fountain, stoically stood up on a platform nimbly switching between synths and guitar, enters the arena with over-the-head headphones on like a disc jockey… like he’s subliminally calling the shots. Jarman’s sly smirk and beat-driven-movements reflect her poise and focus. Duncan’s movements, more metallic than alternative, are stealthy but sharp. The most literal evidence of the ‘rock star energy’ the entirety of the band possesses.

As it pertains to their convictions, the group have believed in themselves from the start. “I think from the very beginning, we’ve always had the goal of reaching higher and higher with each goal we set for ourselves,” says Jarman. “And now, we’re able to play these bigger rooms.”

Despite the collective high-octane energy of the group, the common denominator of the comments section of nearly every flipturn live performance video is the lauding of VonBalson, whose gravitational pull and mastery of the physical and emotional elements of his instrument are definitive and unmissable.

“My dad is a drummer, and also very expressive and dramatic, and just a monster behind the kit,” says VonBalson, referencing his father’s well-known Florida-based outlet Shangri La. 

VonBalson is an expert at smacking the crap out of the kit. He does so while harnessing a rabid, concentrated physicality as his body, while positioned downward, is not hunched but rather repeatedly absorbed and released by the instrument. In several instances, his passages bring him to a near standing position. Rarely does he commit to a smile onstage, as he maintains a game face so steadfast it could conceivably be theatrical.

“He’s always… moving,” says Fountain, coolly acknowledging VonBalson’s methods. “Drums are such a physical instrument. There are drummers that are very relaxed, but we’re playing rock music. The crowd loves to see us move. If we move, they move. If they move, we move more. It’s an energy exchange.” 

Basse, as front man, acts as a similarly imposing presence in both his performative nature and overall vocal technique. On “Sad Disco,” off their 2022 album Shadowglow, his vocals remain uniquely understated as he lingers on the subdued, hypnotic facet of his lower range, which exists with an Aaron Neville-like tendency to it as his head mix and straight mixed registers quiver without the loss of pitch.

Amid live performances of “Sad Disco,” as well as Burnout Days tracks such as “Inner Wave” and “Swim Between Trees,” he integrates the usage of mixed voice with aimless, floating motions of his hands, with movements motioning the audience towards him. It’s a casual act with a touch of sensuality that enhances his mystique in this register.

“When we first started, it was all about the energy,” Basse says. 

Elsewhere, Basse integrates a Robert Plant-like goat vibrato on “August,” a breakout hit off 2018’s Citrona and unleashes an all-consuming, yet somehow conditioned, vigor on new tracks “Right?” and “Burnout Days.” The positioning and resonance of his vocal placement of growls and other example of vocal fry in his second passage, as well as the body language he rightly places himself in in order to create this sound, is reminiscent of both the modern-day and formative stars of glam rock.

“Whenever we’re writing the next record, we’re just always trying to create something different,” says Basse, modestly avoiding the specifics of his approach. “That also means, vocally, doing something different, so that each song can have something that stands out on the record. That’s probably where it’s coming from. The music always comes first, so whatever the music is calling for, vocally, that’s usually the direction I’ll go in.”  

In an appearance on The Voice in 2013, contemporary soul icon Jill Scott referred to Janis Joplin’s version of “Piece Of My Heart” as “gutter talk.” The same could be said in regard to “Right?,” which, alongside the title track, is undoubtedly the crux of this record. With its inexplicably gritty instrumental frame and applicable vocal thickness from Basse, the tune meets the criteria of the distinguished ‘gutter talk’ description of a song that emits desperation, rage, and, to put it plainly, utter nastiness across its lyrical and musical content.

Tension, as a concept, is the ideal descriptor of the psychedelic nature of the track from its first beat. Basse, Duncan, and Jarman are most predominantly featured throughout, with the former two in near-perfect cohesion in its latter half as Basse, propped in his lower baritone register, wails and trembles with unbridled agility and conscious, robust vocal mechanics on the lines, “RIHHHHHH IHHHHHH HIGHT?/ You must persist under the pressure to be somebody’s narcissist/ Right?/ You must admit under the consequences you start to indulge in it.” Duncan’s guitar riff is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” known the world over for its choppy destructiveness, musically contradicting Basse’s lengthy lyrical bursts of anger with his own brief, sprinted ruptures of toxic vitality.

Flipturn, like many creatives of this era, were molded by a shifting technological landscape, multiple shifts of the musical guard, and a growing locational accessibility of prolific festivals, and eagerly inserted themselves into the zeitgeist. They did so from humble beginnings and speak openly of them.

“We’re a good example of how you CAN get out of a small town and play,” says Fountain. “We all got together by chance. We were all driven to do the same thing, and we all played in the same environments, and a lot of people find it very difficult to go from there. Like, playing New York City for a sold-out show. Musically, it’s kind of hard to tell, because you’re just in it, but it’s cool to hear that there are people out there who are possibly referencing us for their music creation because that’s what we were constantly doing as kids. Even now, you still listen to bands that you did and reference something you’re inspired by while recording. We just came out of a garage.”

Jarman and Duncan cut in. “We stayed in Florida too… we never moved out,” she says, immediately passing the mic over. 

“One of the Dakotas, or some random state,” adds Fountain. “If we can do it, anyone can do it,” adds Jarman, with a laugh. “It’s just pure [keeping] your head to the ground for years of not wanting to do anything else.”

They took the stage at Terminal 5 an hour or so following this interview, routinely exhibiting their recurring performance habits in real time. The set spanned nearly an hour and 40 minutes with the New York crowd joyously crammed into every crevice of a room that does not cater to those of a smaller stature. Songs like “Whales,” “Juno,” “Rodeo Clown,” “Churches,” and “Chicago” resonated brilliantly, eliciting electric responses and rousing sing-alongs, and the band, though particularly Basse and Duncan, seemed to revel and flourish even through the final third of the show.

Towards the end of the set, VonBalson carried out his nightly crowd work, frequently seen on social media, as he descended to the fans at the barricade for a dose of makeshift improvisation. He flashed a brief smile, his first noticeable ‘out-of-character’ moment of the evening, before immediately resuming his altered persona. Off mic, he wailed, “1! 2! 1-2, 1-2-3-4!!!,” into the void, though he likely reached the back row, and went on to perform 30-40 seconds of freestyle. His shoulders remained positioned squared and center, displaying the rigors of the physical aptitude he has acquired. As the band exited the stage, he viciously tossed his drum sticks up to the sky. The rest of the group walked off with a similar swagger.

For flipturn, it was just another night’s work.

flipturn will embark on a second leg of their Burnout Days Tour, with support from New Jersey-based rock act Joe P, across the US this summer. You can follow them on Instagram here. Burnout Days is out now.