Almost a year ago, Self's 1999 DreamWorks effort began seeing more traction than ever with a viral trip-pop opus. Its popularity cascaded into the rest of Breakfast with Girls, leading their just-achieved million monthly listeners on Spotify to assume they've experienced everything the era had to offer.
However, beyond the realm of streaming services, there are a few more songs that never saw any wide distribution.
The album's vinyl-only deluxe edition includes an underrated gem: "Fliptop Box." Across the years, it's mapped Self's transitional period between looser bedroom experiments and later fuller pop production. It can also be perfectly adapted into a cautionary tale against modern doomscrolling.
How "Fliptop Box" is a hidden cautionary tale
Long before its origin project, "Fliptop Box" was already known by the band's community. It was included in setlists by late 1996, but excluded from the band's 1997 sophomore record. It seemingly had a spot on their third album, until DreamWorks hacked away at the tracklist to make it under 50 minutes.
Fortunately for fans, leader Matt Mahaffey knew a workaround to get his music out. A little after Breakfast with Girls came out, he started bundling them with a puffy sticker and a CD for Brunch, a three-song extended play that kicks off with none other than the focus of this story.
"Fliptop Box" sits among Self's most pointedly direct songs: its lyrical imagery points to a cigarette pack as both confidant and enemy. Musically, it uses tight power-pop craft leavened with discordant studio oddities and sampling, wrapping dark subject matter in hook-driven arrangements.
Intentional stumbles through form and tempo for amplified composure
Technics-wise, the track's art rock style uses common 4/4 time, falling at a tempo of 88 ⅙ BPM. Its layout starts with a 4-bar intro, then cycles through an 8-bar verse, a 4-bar pre-chorus, and an 8-bar chorus three times. Notably, the final chorus ends half a bar early with a few quick crashes.
That type of discordant interjection is not uncommon throughout the song. Its instrumental break continuously peppers interjected cuts for 14 bars, resembling a 7/8 time signature more than the standard. Contrarily, the 5-bar bridge that follows is the most harmonic section of the entire piece.
Self's tendency to puncture forms through these three minutes and forty-five seconds helps break the strictly conventional feeling. The tight and hooky verses give way to instrumentally denser choruses, shifting melodic emphasis, while the break and bridge intensify these dynamics.
A tonal tug-of-war full of gritty sounds
You likely won't find transcriptions for "Fliptop Box" anywhere due to how hard it is to discern any chords. Five seconds in, the song employs a brass section that sounds as if played by out-of-tune middle schoolers. This bluntness is intentional, signaling the listener of the song's bipolar mood.
Its tug-of-war between minor tension and bright major colors gives the song its bittersweet edge: verses lean on darker voicings while choruses open up with more cathartic tones. This tonal push/pull throughout the track helps shift timbres (such as clean vs. distorted guitar) to change the listener's sense of key center.
The drums act as the song's stable anchor, using a rock-solid acoustic kit feel underpinned by percussive accents often paralleled by guitar or piano. This approach gives the performance human punch while allowing for the precision and quirks of quick stops and reversed hits.
Addiction personified through confessions and satire
The song is lyrically compact, darkly witty, and autobiographical, with the "fliptop box" operating as an externalized antagonist. Mahaffey's lines blend confessional first-person admissions of weakness with scathing, satirical images aimed at the cultural face of smoking.
The chorus's repeated phrases ("Crying wait, wait, now you're alone") encapsulate the momentary relief of the cigarette, followed by the emotional hollow it leaves. Mahaffey sits forward vocally, with the mix accentuating his inflection and sarcasm when needed, further straining his reluctance each verse.
Despite the many references, the title is the closest the song gets to actually mentioning smoking. Mahaffey's personified yet general lyricism makes the song applicable to all types of unjustifiable addictions, including a common modern interpretation: doomscrolling.
Viral doomscrolling edit potential amidst obscurity and rarity
The emerging prevalence of short-form content and hyper-perfection of tailored algorithms has led to the phenomenon of spending hours consuming content on phones. Most people have experienced this, making "Fliptop Box" an easy song to adapt in reels, recognizing the behavior.
The track hasn't trended very strongly, though, due to its sheer obscurity. DreamWorks made 5,000 copies of Brunch, with few being sold individually in limited stores. These went quickly, with the song already being introduced live as "from our CD that's available on eBay" only six days after release.
Furthermore, Geffen Records abstained from putting the EP on streaming services, making the natural discovery of the song near impossible. Nevertheless, fans made big enough waves to be noticed by Mahaffey, who in December 2023 cheekily posted a pair of "TikTok socks" for their soundalike name.
Old-School Version: softer, stripped vulnerability
While the studio version lays out fuller textures, it strays far from traditional compositions and might fatigue some. Luckily for this audience, a reworked acoustic rendition was released on October 5th, 2000. No more piano, horns, or samples: this time, the entire backing was just guitars and percussion.
This recording, subtitled the "Old-School Version", holds a steady, repeating groove with a near-dry vocal mixed in the center. The tempo plays a couple of beats faster here, additionally halving each pre-chorus and exchanging the entire song from the bridge to the end with a 16.75-bar instrumental outro.
The stripped-back style also changes the tone, with the chorus's repeated sadness coming off more vulnerable. Being cut down to 3:09, the acoustic take recasts "Fliptop Box" as a folk-tinged lament where the subject's addiction reads less like satire and more like raw, human failing.
Super Mario Mix: bouncing around in chiptune irony
Deliberately opposing the acoustic version, Self released a "Super Mario Mix" of the song on December 16th, 2000, as part of their remix EP Self Goes Shopping. A completely instrumental song, the rock band's grit is replaced by bright, cartoonish electronic textures.
Bumped up to 113.75 BPM, it extends the pre-choruses, break, and bridge by a bar or two. It additionally repeats the final chorus and even appends an 8-bar outro of ambient store noises overlaying the drums, winding up six seconds longer than the original.
The remix relies on chiptune flutes, bouncy synth bass, handclaps, and other deliberately playful effects. This sunny, game-like instrumentation somewhat produces a pitch-black comedy: the seriousness of the original is flipped into an absurdly fun feeling of adventure, void of any context.
Three versions, one sharp pop indictment
Across the studio original, vulnerable acoustic reading, and a tongue-in-cheek electronic remix, "Fliptop Box" reveals itself as a composition whose strength lies in its melodic clarity and lyrical edge. It can be stripped of artifice to expose raw sentiment, or decked in synths to highlight its ironic possibilities.
The song's arc from its first live performances through its official releases and reinterpretations shows both Mahaffey's confidence in the song and Self's willingness to interrogate a single idea from multiple angles.
No matter how the tale of addiction is heard, this tune's mix of humor, self-exposure, and tight popcraft is a compact distillation of what made Self compelling: hook-first songwriting that's never afraid to complicate the catchiness with a sting.