G Flip - About You

The first thing that you experiment while listening to Georgia Flipo's debut song is a feeling of "dèja-vu", as if you were arriving to a new and fascinating city, but somehow it all feels very familiar to you; on a second look to the place, you start recognizing the influence of other cultures in the architecture, lifestyle and language. Just to keep going with this analogy, "About You" could very well be the music equivalent of a city like Melbourne, the hometown of Flip: a place entirely fresh and chic, but also very laid-back, but that on closer look is a pastiche of the best that San Francisco, Amsterdam and Portland have to offer you.

In About You, the first reference that comes to your mind is Lorde's Melodrama: a pop track that looks beyond the genre in its structure and delivery. About You opens with a deep and dense keyboard that almost sounds orchestral while she delivers a first verse about the discoveries of oneself after a heartbreak before adding an electronic percussion that finally transitions it to a chorus in the realms of pop, with her layered vocals. Right at this point, this could be very well a Haim track (of their debut album, of course), with that joyous teen energy pushed through the instrumentation as much as by the vocals, which in turn, are as enigmatic and detached as Sky Ferreira's.

It is the second verse that again hits at Lorde's speed variations in tracks like Supercut or Homemade Dynamite, but there where Lorde might have restricted the in-crescendo and twisted the path of the song, G Flip goes full to show us what will be her unique trademark: a drum solo that hits the climax of the song. It's as if she has reserved the best trick for the punchline, as for her profile in Triple J's website, she has 10 years of experience playing drums and only in the last year she learned about production and other instruments. She sounds like a four members band (plus back-singers), but it is only when we read about her and watch the music video that all of this is a DIY work, and finally we find the missing piece in the references puzzle: the forward auteur-pop of Grimes.

G Flip has been paying attention to all the right things that have come in the last years in indie-pop music, a genre that, maybe with the exception of Perfume Genius (who is more avant-garde) and Vampire Weekend (who are more indie-rock), has been heavily dominated by female musicians, and by channeling all the great things that this alternative divas have experimented before, she is very able to offer a track that sounds so effortless cool, but that in reality carries a lot of work. We are intrigued to hear what she'll release to follow this gem, but right now, G Flip is the first artist to emerge in a post-Melodrama world, a world where pop music is fixed by getting rid of the horrible dubstep and putting instrumentation on front of everything else.