Exclusive video premiere of ‘Pan’s Daughter’ by Nashville’s Flummox, taken from their upcoming album, ‘Rephlummoxed’, out April 1, 2022 via Needlejuice Records.

Queer / transfemme metal band Flummox’s latest track ‘Pan’s Daughter’ is a sprawling epic in several movements, with Flummox exploring a proggy, mindbending fusion of monolithic doom, symphonic thrash & synth-laden blackened death metal. The song is based on Welsh writer Arthur Machen’s late-1800s horror/fantasy novella The Great God Pan.

Formed in a rundown trailer near the garbage dump off an old Tennessee highway, Flummox has been causing audiences to fall into euphoric fits of shock for close to a decade. Branding their style as “genre fluid”. The band combines twisted musical-theater tactics with avant-garde fusion and extreme metal anchored by strange hooks that stick with you well past their welcome.

Max Mobarry (lead guitar): “‘Pan’s Daughter’ is our ode to the devil. It was one of the songs that initially attracted me to this band before I joined. It’s just this monumental doom / death-metal song. Flummox has its roots in doom, in a big way. They were huge Black Sabbath fans in their younger years. But ‘Pan’s Daughter’ really shines—it’s just this monolithic two-note slab. The song sounds like a tree full of demons being ripped open, and all of these souls are flying out. Just total cacophony. I really wanted the vocals on the track to sound like a wall of demons. Not even a traditional heavy-metal vocal; something more terrifying. About halfway through, the song segues into this symphonic thrash / blackened death-metal song with these giant keyboards. I have to give credit to our keyboard player Jesse Peck for making it feel as huge as it does. And then it just kind of devolves into this madness. Given the band’s doom roots, I knew this kind of sound would rear its head in one way or another, especially on an album of re-recordings. “Pan’s Daughter” is also one where we perform it live and it just levels the place”.

Chase McCutcheon (lead guitar, producer, engineer): We started the song off with a Zappa ‘200 Motels’ sample—that bit about “the devil’s got an English accent”. Production-wise, I wanted the listener to imagine walking into this big gladiator arena, and this giant Goddess comes out, and you’re about to face off, and this big ambience hits you in the face. From start to start to end, ‘Pan’s Daughter’ is just a wall of brutality”.

Alyson Blake Dellinger (lead vocals, bass): The lyrical content of ‘Pan’s Daughter’ is based on a novella by Arthur Machen called The Great God Pan. The main antagonist in the story is the daughter of Pan, who was conceived out of this obscene science experiment. She’s a shapeshifter who, more or less, rapes people to death. The story was a big influence on H.P. Lovecraft, like these celestial beings from other universes. It was the late 1800s, and it was very shocking for the time. I got a hold of a copy several years ago, and I was like, “This is this is something.” It’s very interesting. It’s not written like a traditional story, and “Pan’s Daughter” is not written like a traditional song. Our drummer Alan [Pfeiffer] goes especially hard on this song with his blasts and his fills, but at the same time, he keeps it reserved when it needs to be—some parts sound tribal, evoking this sense of being in the woods late at night, doing things you shouldn’t be doing, things that are not good for your soul. The vocals on the song are a shared effort between me and Jody Lester from Bled to Submission, who was our drummer for a couple of years, and played on the original version of ‘Pan’s Daughter’ in 2016. It was good to have him back in the studio to lay down vocals with us, especially with this song because it’s meant to sound like a shapeshifter mixing faces as it’s speaking. Musically, we wanted ‘Pan’s Daughter’ to sound like a horror film.

Flummox caused a stir last year with trans-rights anthem, ‘Trans Girls Need Guns’, a track that rails against anti-trans violence. The song was released on the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Since then, the band has been hard at work on new album ‘Rephlummoxed’ (out April 1 on Needlejuice Records), for which they have re-imagined and re-recorded some of their favorite songs from past Flummox albums. This has given the music a chance to be interpreted by the band’s impressive new expanded lineup, which includes the original core of Dellinger, guitarist and co-founder Drew Jones and drummer Alan Pfeiffer, as well as new members Max Mobarry and Chase McCutcheon on guitar, and keyboardist Jesse Peck.

Flummox was also just added to the lineup for this summer’s Maryland Doom fest, and has an album-release show scheduled for April 1 in Nashville at The Basement, followed by a brief supporting tour across the Southeastern & Midwestern U.S.

Headline photo: Keith McQuarrie

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