Wild Pink’s endless American highway

He sees it through the lens of the drifters that inhabit abandoned strip malls and janky dive bars. Rot, sickness, and despair sweep through the nondescript cities, sometimes engendered by massive corporations with little regard for their environmental fallout; sometimes by the substances people use to cope as their hometowns decay before their eyes.

Before moving to New York City, Ross began writing songs in North Florida, where he sought to distill the oddities of far-flung places that hardly breach the surface of mainstream discourse. Even with natural treasures like Everglades National Park and a plentiful alligator population, the region’s beauty is often eclipsed by snap judgements and clickbait headlines. Behind every “Florida man” caricature sits a quieter, less sensational story shaped by grit and struggle when it’s increasingly difficult to stay afloat.

Battling and beating cancer, then becoming a father for the first time, pushed him to create what he calls a “genuine rock record,” which he recorded in just a few takes at Alex Farrar’s renowned Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, where both Wednesday and MJ Lenderman have tracked records. Each jocular, earnest story slides into the next with ease, rooted firmly in the present rather than straining for some greater significance. More geographically ambiguous than ILYSM (2022), the album’s jangly piano and wailing pedal steel impart a lived-in expansiveness that belongs to any unkempt, cinematic stretch of the country.

Much like the boundless highway where it begs to be played loud with the windows down, the album’s cast of NFL chuds and hardworking everymen burning the candle at both ends could exist in any of the tiny towns scattered between rolling mountains and atmospheric swamps. Unlike the glossy textures on A Billion Little Lights (2021), Still Coming Down possesses a tired and jagged weariness, its palms caked with dirt.

Behind every jab directed towards the people you pass on these endless, monotonous drives is a sombre capitulation to the downstream effects of capitalism and corporatism that shaft us all. “ It leaches into everything, the way we consume music, how you live your life every day, and it sucks. It’s discouraging. It feels like you’ll never really be free from that. It seems impossible to live outside of the system,” Ross elaborates.

Of the album’s carousel of characters, Ross “hardly [takes] any liberties with a lot of the stories. It’s a fun way to visit memories. I think that you can hear a story about something that has nothing to do with you or your experience and, somehow, find something relevant in it.” After fine‑tuning his protagonists so their inner universes leap beyond the confines of the streaming platform or stage – beefcakes whose muscles pull their tattoo ink thin, and bystanders watching loved ones lose themselves to misinformation and conspiracy theories – Ross has come to accept that he’s “a pretty obsessive person.”

For example, “500 Is The New 250” includes a quip about “this guy with a nasty tattoo that says, ‘Fuck you, Yankee bitch.’ Years ago, at a gas station in Florida, this huge guy was walking around with that tattoo. I was like, holy shit, and it stuck with me ever since. I wanted to find a place for that in a song. The line comes out of nowhere in that song, and it feels harsh and jarring.” He wasn’t sure if that line was a good idea, but after much deliberation, he kept it.

“Like Water” zooms in on a period of his childhood when his parents housed a Romanian woman, who his mother met working at an airline agency. “You left Bucharest in ‘92 / After they killed Ceaușescu / You moved into my parents’ basement room / With your mother who never learned a word of English, too,” he swoons over warmly fuzzed-out guitar that blooms into a twinkling interlude.

After the band released Dulling The Horns in 2024, they opened for MJ Lenderman & The Wind on the spiritual successor to brat summer, the Manning Fireworks tour. “That was really educational. Seeing how that band does their thing was very inspiring. I’m mostly interested in the live experience, how the songs sound for someone who bought a ticket and came to the show, as opposed to making music for headphones,” Ross gushes. The triumphant instrumental break on “Round Of Applause At The End Of The World” and raspy bass on “Plates Keep Spinning” are built for soul-stirring catharsis between headphones as much as onstage.

With these elements of performance in mind, he tries “ to let the recordings be pretty raw and not overcooked, which I could sometimes do with earlier records, like A Billion Little Lights. I stick to the instruments that we’re playing on stage, not adding a bunch of synths that won’t be there live or extra computer production.” The simple, analogue arrangements nod to a long line of singer‑songwriters channelling collective defeatism and breathing life into wandering heroes searching for answers in a cold, unrelenting world (the reference to “Ybor City” on “Round Of Applause” might perk the ears of Craig Finn fans, for example). And yet: “Strangely, I feel like I’ve found my voice on this record,” Ross says.

The laundry list of collaborators includes Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy and MJ Lenderman, plus an ensemble cast of players such as Landon George and Xandy Chelmis from The Wind, Japanese Breakfast saxophonist Adam Schatz, Josh Kolenik of Small Black, and longtime bandmates Dan Keegan and Mike “Slo-mo” Brenner, who round out the album, mastered by Stuck’s Greg Obis. Ross granted his creative partners a significant degree of autonomy to ensure their contributions were fully realised, saying, “ Most everybody did their parts after the core principal recording was done, and then Alex [Farrar] or I would edit them down. Typically, I would edit them and then send them on to Alex. I essentially let everyone do whatever they wanted.”

This patchwork of touchstones and musical backgrounds animates the characters whose stories are often represented by grim statistics and poverty-porn thinkpieces, if they’re fortunate enough to be represented at all. Ross approaches each one tenderly and without judgement.