FLAMINGO BLONDE
Words: Em Tobin
Photography: James Caswell (@jaamescaswell)
Flamingo blonde’s sophomore EP Deli Music moves through the landscape of subtropical suburbia, paying homage to life lessons shaped by time and change. The EP marks a maturation of the flamingo blonde sound and songwriting, presenting a body of work that is directly tied to growing pains. Deli Music speaks to authenticity, a robust, honest earnestness revealed first through lyricism and then, jarringly, solidified through sound. Deli Music takes you on a quest hand in hand with flamingo blonde, through Brisbane and overseas. It is the type of EP where you are walking in another’s shoes, through the footprints of time left behind yet remembered.
I caught up with flamingo blonde's James Bartlett in West End ahead of the release of Deli Music, the first sunstreaks of spring shifting through the Sunday afternoon. The day feels as pleasant and easy as the flamingo-blonde sound, soaked in guitar, synth, and warmth. Recorded at a deli turned DIY studio, the project is grounded in the ethos of creativity and experimentation. Deli Music transforms the more unique essences of James’ creative vision, allowing for a true head-first dive into surrealism and synthetics. The EP marks an exciting shift for the project, a free fall into the endless, beaming boundaries of experimentation, expanded upon through accompanying music videos and imaginative storytelling.
Flamingo blonde’s Deli Music truly marks a moment in time, grounded in the fruits of a dream and speaking directly to the project’s individuality. During my catch-up with James, we spoke about the roots of writing and producing the EP, being an artist in Brisbane, a quest to find a puppet, and what’s next for flamingo blonde.
flamingo blonde by James Caswell (@jaamescaswell)
EM: Hey James, thanks for making the time to catch up and chat about the flamingo blonde EP, Deli Music. How does it feel to have completed the project, and what were the main takeaways from the process of writing and producing?
JAMES: It’s taken a little while to get together, which was planned, in a way, taking a break and allocating a bit of time to it. Maybe not this long, but working on it over the last two years and recording and demoing with my brother Josh (01 Thurman), who plays drums in the live band, in this space which we call the Deli that the EP was named after. Then we took it to Isaac Rodgers, who is a beautiful friend of ours, to work on it in his space at The Tunnel Studio. It was really nice to go into a project from the ground up as opposed to going into a shinier, professional studio.
It was nice to be able to kind of get in the weeds a bit, with Isaac co-producing the record and taking time to really dig into the recording process and mixing, and also to have a lot of control over the sound. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, much to my detriment, so it’s taken time. I’m always worried about overcooking it, but it was great to spend time with the music, and also my beautiful boys Josh and Isaac. It’s been a wonderful process and helped create a time capsule on the EP.
I did maybe want to do it over one year, but that’s the beauty of working with friends and having access to the space and time. It would often be a Tuesday, and we’d text each other like, what are you doing Thursday night? So we’d go in for a couple of hours, but because we’re friends, we’d sort of feel it out. It was nice not to feel rushed; we took our time with it, and wanted to write from the ground up. I feel like the first EP was a collection of the first five years of working under the name flamingo blonde. This was the first time I wrote a project rather than capturing whatever at the time.
EM: Overall, how have you been inspired by music, genre, and sound to create a sonically cohesive EP?
JAMES: I guess it’s funny, because my taste changes. I’m a victim of every couple of months switching up what I want the next thing to sound like. Sometimes that works in my favour and creates interesting details. Writing this EP, I wanted it to have a bit more dirt than what we’ve done previously. I love a lot of pop music, so I’m naturally drawn to music that is shiny and clean, but I tried to fight that urge to get things sounding a bit dirtier. There’s still plenty of shine, but it also does have that grit.
It’s always funny when you talk about your inspirations because it doesn’t always translate. Sounds I’m referencing or am inspired by are never close to what I’m making sonically. Looking back at, say, 2024 and 2025, it was really the big moment for MJ Lenderman and Wednesday; there’s a lot of noisier, really screechy, blown-out guitars in the background of their stuff. I loved playing around with noise.
I don’t think I’ll ever shake The Strokes. That’s always going to be an inspiration deeply embedded within me as a white guy with a guitar in his 20s. Porches are always an inspiration. When we first recorded the EP, they’d just released the album Shirt, which balances stripped-back, simple, DIY sounds, but a lot of it feels off the cuff at times. I love working with Auto-Tune as a tool rather than a crutch, but you have to be very conscious of that. I think Porches toes that line well. Flamingo blonde will always be a guitar-based project, but I tried to pull in elements of pop and even dance in some ways, experimenting with samples here and there. I’d just got a new KORG synth I was playing with, so maybe that was a catalyst.
EM: What can you say about the way flamingo blonde has matured and refined their sound on the new EP?
JAMES: I think the first EP was a real bookmark from where it was released. I think this was a lot more considered and recorded within the same space with the same people over a continuous period of time. I think it’s a little bit more, not tight, but more cohesive, and definitely I feel it stamped a time in my life.
A lot of the lyricism is a little bit retrospective, and I feel like I talk a lot about hitting your mid-twenties and the changes no one really tells you about. Whether that’s friendships or relationships or even locations, if you move, those changes show that nothing is forever as you’re growing up. It’s really about entering your late twenties, I guess.
EM: Can you walk me through the lyricism behind Handbrake Song and the story encapsulated within the music?
JAMES: Handbrake Song is about pausing and being like, “What am I doing? What’s going on?” Changes in friendships and relationships, really. The handbrake itself is sort of a motif, pulling to stop. Stepping back and trying to assess what’s going on, especially after getting caught up in the fun of it all, which is what I think you should be doing, but you know, maybe it's a song about developing your frontal lobe. Pulling the handbrake and starting to try to piece things together and figure out what you want to do, whether that be your career, relationship, or where you’re living, the kind of people you want to be around, and just not putting yourself first, but starting to think about the future in a way where you do want to help yourself out.
EM: I love the nostalgia evoked through the lyricism on Wishes. Can you walk me through what inspired the track?
JAMES: I was in the UK in 2024, and the hotel in question in the first line about throwing up in the shower. I had been in the UK a year before, but I was revisiting it with a new lens, walking around London on similar streets I’d walked before but in a new headspace, and seeing things as a whole a year later with a totally different perspective. The chorus alludes to letting go, in a way. Using a new perspective to let go of feelings of solidity and what you maybe felt was safe, things you take for granted, and realising that with that change the only thing you can do is let it happen, pick yourself back up, and move on. If you want to give up on a wish, if you want me swimming with the fish, a bit more mafia than my actual life, but really it’s about letting life take
the reins a bit.
EM: Your second EP single, Force Majeure, is a real stand-out off the release. What was the process behind writing and recording the track?
JAMES: I wanted something a little bit more understated and wanted to anchor the track on something bare, more considered. When I write, I tend to put the entire kitchen sink in, just layer upon layer upon layer, which is fun because you can keep moving. The trouble that comes with getting to that point of recording from demos is to strip things out and find bits you really think “this is essential”. I think the biggest learning is to kill my darlings a bit; I might like three different bits or pieces, but I have to choose one.
Maybe that’s me being mature about it. A force majore is an unforeseen circumstance in legal contracts, and I had some big changes in my life before I met my current partner. It was unplanned and out of the blue. I wasn’t planning on getting into anything; really, I was planning on spending a year hunkering down and being a hermit, but then this big change happened and made my life a lot better. It’s the first flamingo blonde love song.
I like to keep stuff vague so people can read into it however they want or can take away what they like. I am rarely too specific. This is pretty clearly about being struck by that unforeseen sense of care, love, and adoration. Instrumentally though, I enjoyed instrumentally putting a lot of shiny synths to play around in the high end.
flamingo blonde by James Caswell (@jaamescaswell)
EM: The Statestar visualizer is such a unique feature, with flamingo blonde heading around Fortitude Valley with a puppet. How did you come up with the idea and concept behind the video?
JAMES: I really love working with visuals. Whenever I write or record, I always kind of have a visual in mind. For Statestar, I had a lot of things I threw around. Sidenote, I think we’re all going to have a very puppet summer. I just googled Brisbane puppeteer, and there weren’t many, but I found this photo of this guy, David Hamilton, probably from about thirty years ago, with a selection of puppets, and then I saw this Blues Brothers one, and I knew I really wanted the little guy.
I couldn’t find any contact details for David online, but I did see that he performed at a Westfield three years ago. I called Westfield, and they put me onto their marketing team, who put me onto their separate events team, and then they gave me what they thought was his number. I sent an email and hadn’t heard back for a couple of weeks. The song was coming out in a couple of weeks, so I was thinking, “Man, I really need to come up with a new idea”. On the Friday afternoon at about five thirty, I got a call from an unknown number, and it was David the puppeteer, and he said he got the email. I told him the idea where I wanted to do a visualiser run-and-gun with a puppet, and he really liked the idea and was very kind, talking about how when he was an up-and-coming artist, a lot of people had helped him out and done favours, so he was eager to do the same for me.
We just went into the Valley at the car park. I wasn’t sure what I was going to wear, so the day before I sort of just decided that I had to dress the same as the puppet in the blue outfit. My buddy Ken, who filmed the video, met up with David and just did some dancing and walking around the Valley to make our little entourage moment. It ended up being a lot of fun; it’s one of the weirder songs, and the puppet is quite horrific up close. It’s all in the magic of David's hands; he made the puppet, and he actually added another string to the face that day so he could look up at the camera, which I thought was really going the extra mile. It was just a fun collaboration that I didn’t expect.
EM: Wormhook is such a sonically interesting track. How did you find the methodology and process of generating sound for the song, and what did you draw inspiration from?
JAMES: I’ve always kind of periodically written a song that is deliberately a song to end our live set. Off the last EP, Time Alone was an outro we could build on. This one felt as if it was the spiritual sequel to that track. I wanted something with a hard and robotic driving beat, which we could really play out on with a long instrumental outro we could get weird with. We reran the stems into my 404 and were screwing around with that to get some interesting sounds. It’s a synth-heavy song; we had to drop a few from the original demo, but I love having a track that we can build up on. Lyrically, it ended up just being some loose thoughts on the state of being an artist in Brisbane with everyone always moving to Melbourne. It’s kind of just reckoning with the idea of having built something of a life and putting an anchor here, with the stress on young people and artists to be able to create, especially with rental prices and liquor laws and restrictions, especially in the arts and entertainment. That’s my vague contribution to the ever-growing narratives about artists debating leaving Brisbane.
EM: Flamingo blonde put on an epic BIGSOUND karaoke afterparty show. What was your takeaway or favourite moment from the event?
JAMES: It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, the karaoke event. I’m glad that Blutes were so on board; it’s kind of become a natural magnet that we go to. That’s what Karaoke, Baby! was referencing on the last EP, so it’s always been part of the flamingo blonde identity.
I’d planned to do it at BIGSOUND and get artists from the lineup on, but when I booked the Tuesday night, I soon realised a lot of the artists, very understandably, didn’t want to blow their voices out on the first night of showcases. I ended up putting a lot of Brisbane bands on the lineup, and Brisbane has always been punching above our weight; we have an incredible community because, historically, we’ve been up against geographical isolation, but it makes this scene pretty unique. The community is so strong because we have to build so much for ourselves and back each other. After all, it’s not super easy for emerging artists to get out of the bubble here.
Having so many Brisbane artists and interstate friends who feel like honorary Brisbane bands was lovely.
Watching EJ Wood do all eight minutes of Mirrors out there, fully owning it, at one am on a Tuesday was so powerful, especially given he was going to do a different song, and they just didn’t have it. Underlay, originally from Newcastle via Melbourne, was sweet as Cody ended the project a year ago, but getting him back in town whilst he was playing with DC Maxwell and making an unofficial final appearance doing Goodbye Stranger, with the band and their lawyer onstage, was special. Hopefully we can run it back next year with a bit more planning.
EM: Your early 2027 EP tour is coming up post-release. Where are you most excited to play or to visit, and why?
JAMES: We’ll definitely do a show in Brisbane to celebrate the release, and hopefully an East Coast run early next year. Really, I just play as much as possible. I’m really enjoying playing live and rebuilding the live set with different band members and set-ups. We’re already recording the next project, which is also shaping how we reinterpret stuff already. I’m excited to dig deeper into that and keep trying to bring out the flamingo blonde live show reinterpreted.
Having a fluid approach to the live set is scary but also very exciting. I think there will be a few different types of shows, and hopefully we’ll get to do what I love the most, which is just playing live.
FIND FLAMINGO BLONDE HERE
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