Words by Paige Daniel
Long hours, little control, and the weight of our own expectations — burnout is an inevitable part of the human experience. Sometimes, you give your all only to find your candle burned down to the wick, flipturn’s newest album, Burnout Days, doesn’t just acknowledge these moments of exhaustion; it reframes them as a chapter of life. The album flows through a litany of learning experiences — ones with the power to drain someone, but also the power to shape them. From giving too much of yourself to the wrong person to watching a friend futilely seek validation from external sources, Burnout Days explores not only the exhausting accumulation of these emotions, but their origins and the patterns they can lead to.
In “Sunlight,” arguably one of the album’s strongest tracks, lead singer Dillon Basse delivers a vulnerable performance as he calls out different family members by name and points to the different emotional baggage they carry. This exploration of generational trauma and the singer’s own troubling patterns as a result of it — “Prunin’ my soul in the sunlight; Taking pride in my abuse” — serves as a grounding moment for the rest of the album. It sets the stage for the soon-to-be-explored letdowns the singer has faced from others and offers a quiet understanding, as if to say, “Hey, you’re probably just as exhausted and messed up as I am.”
Because, throughout the album, we do witness the protagonist wrestle with self-perception and the ways they feel “messed up,” accompanied by possible reasons why. In “Rodeo Clown,” the singer wrestles with their own feelings of inauthenticity, especially as he feels the weight of such heavy emotions, singing,
“I’ve been giving away my comedy, I’ve been playing the crowd.” Other tracks explore patterns of unhealthy attachment — “Window” dives into the slippery slope of telling someone everything, only to come to regret it, while “Reason to Pretend” is a plea to an unraveling relationship: Don’t stay if you don’t want to. Sometimes, people have the power to hurt each other because they love each other, and flipturn somehow manages to convey this through an upbeat melody you can dance along to.
It’s masterful how, despite its heavy themes, Burnout Days retains flipturn’s lighthearted, indie-surf-rock, drive-by-the-beach sound. The weight of exhaustion is there, but so is the warmth of understanding, making for an album that feels both deeply personal and universally relatable.
Love, life, and hurt come in seasons — your burnout days will come to pass. In the album’s ninth track “Tides,” the band takes a moment to deliver a more uplifting promise that matches the work’s bright instrumentals. With lyrics like “change is coming” and “how difficult it is for darkness to last,” we as an audience get to exhale and realize that Burnout Days isn’t simply a reflection on fatigue and what brings us to that point — it’s a reminder that healing is just as inevitable as our darkest times and somebody will always love you, even when you don’t feel worthy of it.
“Supernova glowing from your spirits, baby blue
In the heart of a dying star,
through the dark, I saw you.”
– Burnout Days, flipturn
Loudspeaker Collective 