Wild Pink Goes Alt-Country

John Ross knows a thing or two about self-deception. The songwriter and frontman of Wild Pink fills Still Coming Down, the latest from the shapeshifting New York indie group, with stories of men who have cooked their brains and lost their souls, without gaining much in the bargain. They rob banks, fall down internet rabbit holes, go to bars to bet alone on their phones. They tell themselves stories, but they don’t really believe them. “Your brain is very kind to make you think you’re warm inside,” one man allows, but even he knows it’s a ruse: “You’re so cold, you’re dying.”

These are all-American losers, too hopeless to hate, but without much going for them all the same, and Ross is their bard. Wry and ironic, with a wide-ranging mind and just a smidge of compassion, his songs have the ring of a confession made by someone who does not really want to be forgiven. “How much of God’s love can you take day-in and day-out?” he asks on “Plates Keep Spinning,” the story of a man who fears waking back up in the afterlife and having to keep on with the same old shit. His narrators are exhausted, resigned to lives they’ve slumped into and lack the will (or the energy) to change. “Thought it was something, turns out it’s nothing,” he sings on “Dead for a Sec,” a lifetime condensed into a single exhale. “I still don’t really understand where the time went.”

Ross might understand these men, but he’s hardly a slacker. With Wild Pink he has put out six albums in the last nine years, not to mention plenty of EPs and standalone singles. Restless and ambitious, he has pushed the band’s sound from dreamy bedroom pop through War On Drugs–style space rock and on into wall-of-sound opus territory. This approach hasn’t always worked out—2022’s self-produced ILYSM has some luminous songs, but never finds a center—but it’s been exciting to follow, and has produced a diverse and surprising body of work. As Ross put it on 2024’s “Eating the Egg Whole”: “My stupid ass is always searching.” Well damn, mine too.