Alyson Anomaly performing at Come and Take It Live in Austin, Texas on October 21, 2026. (Photo: Ralph Arvesen)
Alyson Anomaly is a new name attached to an artist with a much longer history of making difficult-to-categorize music. The project belongs to multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Alyson Dellinger, best known as the founder, vocalist and bassist of the Tennessee experimental rock band Flummox. The October run with Mac Sabbath and Clownvis Presley gives Dellinger an opportunity to step outside that band's already loose boundaries and build something even more personal.
That makes Alyson Anomaly an appropriate addition to the October 21 show at Come and Take It Live in Austin. Very little about the bill follows a conventional rock-show formula. Mac Sabbath transforms Black Sabbath into fast-food theater, Clownvis Presley mixes music, comedy and magic, and Dellinger's new project was created specifically as a place where music, performance and whatever other ideas occur to her can coexist.
Dellinger has described Alyson Anomaly as a way to combine the different creative roles she has accumulated over the years. Those include musician, songwriter, actor and theatrical performer, along with time spent contributing to projects such as Unorthodox, Others by No One, Fingernails Are Pretty and Tuff Softies. Instead of separating those interests, the new identity is intended to put them into the same deliberately unpredictable space.
That approach makes more sense after looking at Flummox. Dellinger has fronted the band for more than a decade, and attempts to reduce its music to a single genre tend to fall apart quickly. Progressive rock, thrash, doom, funk, psychedelia, jazz and avant-garde ideas have all appeared in the group's work, sometimes within the same song. The band itself has preferred the simpler description "genre-fluid."
Dellinger's role in that music has never been limited to standing at a microphone. Bass has been central to the sound, frequently operating as a lead instrument rather than simply following the guitar. The theatrical side of the band is equally important. Costumes, strange characters, physical comedy and abrupt stylistic changes have long made Flummox performances feel as interested in keeping a room slightly confused as they are in fitting conventional expectations of a metal show.
That unpredictability has been present since the group's earliest material. Flummox grew from music Dellinger began developing years ago in Tennessee, eventually establishing a reputation in underground progressive and heavy-music circles. Albums including Phlummoxygen, Selcouth, Rephlummoxed and In Hindsight documented a band that seemed increasingly comfortable with the idea that almost any influence could be useful.
The group's 2025 album Southern Progress pushed that approach further while also becoming more personal. Some of its material had roots stretching back years, while other songs developed during and after the pandemic. Dellinger's writing examined subjects including growing up within Southern fundamentalist culture, depression, buried trauma and neurodivergence, placing unusually direct themes inside music that could still change direction without warning.
Executive Dysfunction is one example of that balance. Rather than treating ADHD as an abstract concept, Dellinger wrote about the frustrating experience of understanding what needs to be done while being unable to make the brain cooperate. The music surrounding those ideas remained characteristically restless, proving that strange arrangements and serious subject matter did not need to work against each other.
Another part of Flummox's development came from playing new material live before committing it to recordings. Songs from Southern Progress were worked through onstage, allowing the band to discover which sections succeeded in front of people before the final studio versions were completed. That history matters when considering Alyson Anomaly, because Dellinger has spent years treating live performance as a place to experiment rather than simply reproduce an album.
The current project appears to take that freedom even further. There is not yet the kind of extensive recorded catalog or established performance routine that would make it responsible to describe an Alyson Anomaly show in precise terms. What is clear is that Dellinger has presented it as an intentionally open-ended playground where the different pieces of her creative life no longer need to belong to separate projects.
The fall dates provide one of the first concentrated opportunities to develop that idea on the road. Alyson Anomaly joins Mac Sabbath and Clownvis Presley beginning in Austin, followed by shows in Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham and Greenville. Later in October, Dellinger continues with Mac Sabbath alongside Mexican experimental rock band Descartes a Kant for shows in Mobile and Destin.
It is an unusually compatible tour for a project built around experimentation. Mac Sabbath and Clownvis Presley already depend on audiences being willing to accept that a concert does not have to remain strictly a concert. Theater, comedy, characters and music are mixed together freely. Dellinger's background suggests the same willingness to treat the stage as somewhere ideas can collide rather than somewhere genres need to remain neatly separated.
There is also an interesting reversal in seeing Dellinger presented under her own name-based project after years at the center of a full band. Flummox remains an important part of the story, particularly after Southern Progress, but Alyson Anomaly creates room for material that might not need to satisfy even Flummox's extremely broad definition of itself.
For someone unfamiliar with Dellinger, the safest expectation is probably not to have a very specific expectation at all. Her work has consistently rewarded curiosity more than predictability. Heavy music might lead into something progressive, theatrical or deliberately ridiculous, while humor can sit next to subjects that are considerably more serious.
That makes Alyson Anomaly less a conventional side project than an extension of the instincts Dellinger has followed for years. The name may be new, but the desire to make strange music, combine incompatible ideas and resist easy classification is not. On a tour already populated by mutant fast-food mascots and an Elvis-inspired clown, an artist calling herself Alyson Anomaly hardly feels like the unusual one.
Alyson Anomaly shared the stage with Mac Sabbath, Clownvis, and Worm Suicide at Come and Take It Live.
Alyson Anomaly
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