Every August, the five members of flipturn crack their knuckles.
On Sunday, Aug. 4, the busiest of three stacked dates at this year’s Hinterland, singer Dillon Basse, bassist Madeline Jarman, guitarist Tristan Duncan, synth player Mitch Fountain and drummer Devon VonBalson played their hit single “August” to an incalculable number of Hinterlanders in Saint Charles. And while it seemed like every other attendee was dressed head-to-toe in Chappell Roan pink™, those same fans were screaming back to flipturn, “August, honey, you were mine!”
“August,” off the band’s 2018 EP Citrona, is a fan favorite. It's a staple at any flipturn live show and a seasonal, if melancholic, delight for anyone who sees it performed it in its namesake month.
There's a lot that sets flipturn apart in the crowded indie rock genre. From Basse’s powerhouse tenor and VonBalson’s dynamic drumming to the band's spacey experimentalism and production, they're unique. And their live energy is infectious.
VonBalson isn’t a drummer that just sits idly in the background, keeping rhythm. He’s been known to take a tom and a cymbal into the crowd and perform from the barricade, and he'll also drum with his head stuck inside a tom, as if he were Marshmello or an intergalactic bounty hunter: "I feel like The Mandalorian putting on a helmet, you know? Like, ‘This is the Way.’”
Growing into flipturn
Duncan, Jarman and Basse started flipturn in 2015, towards the end of high school, in their small, coastal hometown of Fernandina Beach. The three went off to Gainesville and the University of Florida, where they met VonBalson and Fountain, who filled out their rhythm and synth sections. Their youth, and desire to go, see and do is evident in their early music, said Basse.
“I think the first two EPs [Heavy Colors (2017), Citrona (2018)] were just very much about discovering who you are when you're in late high school or early college. We come from a very small town in Florida, so that mindset — any town, hometown, really — you wanna get out, but especially in a 3x13 mile island, you’re just like I need to get out of here. I wanna go see places. That just kept being a theme in the first two EPs.”
Duncan also describes the jump from their earliest EPs to their first album Shadowglow as “wanting to grow up compared to actually growing up.”
![“I think the first two EPs were just very much about discovering who you are when you're in late high school or early college,” says Basse. “We come from a very small town in florida, so that mindset, any town [or] hometown really you wanna get out, but especially in a 3x13-mile island, you’re just like I need to get out of here. I wanna go see places. That just kept being a theme in the first two EPs.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/f29893a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1133x1700+0+0/resize/840x1260!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff0%2Ff8%2Fafc365d046259bf6e8546d51b12e%2Fking-hinterland-flipturn-08.jpg)
The band transitioned to remote learning in college to accommodate their first tour, and haven’t stopped touring since. They’ve traveled North America, opening for acts like Mt. Joy, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Adam Melcher, Wilderado and The Revivalists, and have tapped friends including Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners, Illiterate Light and Hotel Fiction for their own headlining adventures.
Days before Hinterland, the band wrapped up an 11-date tour supporting Two Door Cinema Club, a group they’ve looked up to for years.
“Two Door’s a really big influence on all of us as musicians and as a band,” said Jarman, who, only months earlier would've been thrilled just to shake their hands. “So doing this tour is incredible. After our Jacksonville show, we all went to this bar that we go to all the time, and they wanted to go get a drink and we were like yeah we’re down! And just the fact that, talking to them… picking their brain a little bit in our hometown bar was so sick. They’re really friendly and gave us advice for our European tour.”
“My favorite memory was probably the first night that we saw them play,” said Basse, whose own hypnotic voice is a reminder of Two Door lead singer Alex Trimble’s influence on flipturn. “I know you’d seen them live, Mad, I’d never seen them live before. They opened up it was like two songs, obviously they’re amazing, off of their album Tourist History. But when they played ‘Undercover Martyn’ for the first time, hearing that live and knowing that it went just as hard live as it did on the record, I thought that was really really cool to see."
The band's shared culture
Each of the five members of flipturn have niche interests. Fountain makes house music on the low and, as a part-time resident of Southern Florida, is fascinated by iguanas. Jarman’s into swimming. When we met at Hinterland, the nation was in the grips of Olympic fever. Jarman, a former competitive swimmer herself — and the reason they’re called ‘flipturn’ — was not immune.
“We've been watching religiously,” said Jarman. “Honestly, it's always on. Our bus has cable, which is really cool, so we always just have it on NBC. Obviously, [I was a] big competitive swimmer growing up, so it's always fun to watch it. Katie Ledecky is a freaking GOAT. She's a [UF] Gator too. Go Gators! And she's like our age, so it's just so inspiring to see her and Simone Biles and all the other athletes just do their thing.”
Despite the countless hours they've clocked on the road, crammed together, the band has a deep friendship, which is palpable on stage, on screen and even on the tour bus. And in that shared friendship lies shared interests — beyond making music — including Star Wars and watching marble racing videos on YouTube.
They've also developed their own pre-show ritual, praying to “the Holy Purple One” (Prince, for the less musically educated) before every show.
“It’s weird, it started as a joke originally.” Said VonBalson, “We were in Gainesville, Florida, and we were doing an outdoor show at this venue called Heartwood Soundstage. The weather was terrible — I mean the screens we were projecting stuff on were falling over from the wind. The rain was just crazy and people were getting pelted and drenched. And we were like, ‘All right we’ve got to hype ourselves up. Who did an iconic performance in the rain?’ And we were like ‘Oh my god, ‘Purple Rain!’ Prince! We’re gonna go to Him right now. We’re going to get Him here. So we huddled, we prayed to Prince… And I swear, the second we walked on the stage, the clouds literally started parting... By the end of the set there was no more rain and the sun was out. And we were like all right we’re never doing another show without starting it that way. And the shows that we haven't done a Prince prayer have gone…”
“Terribly wrong,” interjected Basse. “It’s made me superstitious.”
“We’ve successfully created a crutch,” Fountain agreed.
Shadowglow
After producing three deeply resonant indie EPs, the band, and fans, were ready for more.
To write their debut album, the band locked themselves in an arid Airbnb for two weeks, trading tropical Florida humidity for dry Arizona heat to find the necessary creative spark. It seems to have worked. Shadowglow is a whopping 14 essential songs long, and serves as proof that the band could produce a deeper longform project.
“Some people won't even know, like, some past EPs, and I think that's awesome,” said Basse, expressing his pride over the strength of their 2022 album. “Shadowglow is... this [group's first] project together, and it's some of my favorite music we've ever written. And so it's cool when people like ‘Space Cowboy’ or ‘Sad Disco.’ Somebody the other day was like, ‘Weepy Woman’ is one of my favorite songs I've ever heard. And that's not even like — that wasn't even a single.”
“Weepy Woman,” the eleventh track off Shadowglow, is self-reflection on acid, and spans thoughtful lows and extravagant highs with cacophonous synth and strings.
And then there's the album's sci-fi single, “Sad Disco,” and its accompanying music video. It's an homage to “cheesy horror films,” complete with a cabin in the woods, young twenty-somethings and an alien abductor, filmed in the same location near Gainesville as 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon.
“I remember we were recording ‘Sad Disco,’” said Duncan of how horror was imbued first through the song, “We were out in Los Angeles. That night we got back and we kept thinking there was a car outside watching us. So we were talking about how ’Sad Disco’ is kinda like slasher-y feeling.”
Fountain also swears he saw a ghost that night, too.
Sophomore release: Burnout Days
Flipturn is inescapable. This year alone, you may have caught them shredding at Austin City Limits, live on Hulu (where they warmed up the stage for Chappell Roan for a second time), or in their unique jam session inside the Jacksonville Jaguars’ locker room. Or maybe you heard their cover of Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s “Don’t Do Me Like That,” on the soundtrack to Apple TV+’s Bad Monkey, alongside other esteemed Petty-heads like Weezer, The War on Drugs, Eddie Vedder and Kurt Vile.
“Having an album under our belt too is pretty huge,” said Duncan. “Because going to a second record… We already jumped into the pool, now we’re wading, swimming, figuring out where to go from there.”
The band’s upcoming, sophomore album Burnout Days will be released Jan. 24, 2025. Singles "Juno" and "Rodeo Clown" are out now.
Flipturn will be back in Iowa next year too, bringing their Burnout Days tour to the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines March 23.
