Wild Pink – Still Coming Down | Album Review
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Fire Talk
I've been thinking, maybe too much, about the many ways you can interpret the title of Wild Pink's new album Still Coming Down. I imagine my mom on the phone with a faraway friend, looking out the kitchen window, neck crooked, telling her friend, “Yeah, it’s still coming down.” I think about myself nervously texting a friend, asking if they’re planning on still coming down for a visit. I see a stranger at a bar ordering another beer, saying they’re still coming down from a bad day at work. It’s a title that demands characters and scenes, and throughout these nine songs, John Ross delivers.
Still Coming Down is Wild Pink’s sixth LP and their first since 2024’s barnstormer Dulling the Horns. Back when that album was released, Aly Eleanor aptly described it as “rougher and rowdier than the band has ever sounded before,” and it absolutely was. Saxophone chaos and lyrics wound so tight around a steel pedal that one misstep could have veered into cacophony. Wild Pink’s previous four albums all varied between soft heartland rock and an emo twinge, but Dulling the Horns offered a foray into that sweet alternative country sound and stuck the landing. Twangier. Looser. Still Coming Down is still rough and still rowdy, but this roughness and rowdiness have been transferred away from the sound and into the stories that Ross creates within each song; imagining different people — a pleased shopper, a bank robber, someone pumping gas — living in the landscape of Wild Pink’s sound.
The album begins with “Box Store,” a track that sounds like a monologue Jason Lee’s character in Mallrats would give while walking the aisles of different stores — lyrics about a strip mall, a beloved air conditioner, and how underrated William Fichtner’s acting is. Instrumentally, the song also serves to establish the robust sound of the album, confident and solidified compared to the crunchier, still-experimental elements of Dulling the Horns. Ross has always had a fullness to his music, but with longtime bandmate Dan Keegan smashing through this record on drums and both Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and MJ Lenderman (+ his collaborators in The Wind, Landon George and Xandy Chelmis), this is simply the loudest Wild Pink has ever been. This approach of burying complex feelings about life between opinions on Mark Wahlberg’s acting career and a cruisin’ guitar make “Box Store” a total dudes rock song, maybe the first in years that makes me think dudes rock is worth saving.
One song later, the Remembering-Some-Guys of “Box Store” is turned on its head in “Round of Applause for the End of the World,” where Ross uses the Kennedy assassinations and the surrounding conspiracies to build up to the realization “I don’t know / What my idea of fun is anymore.” The character that Ross is singing from the perspective of in this song is interested in the shooters themselves, not Lee Harvey Oswald but his assassin Jack Ruby and Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan, particularly the space they occupy between innocence and guilt. The guitars on the track are just as conversational as the conspiratorial lyrics, beginning an unending sound as if lost in thought alongside Ross. Next comes the album’s title track, almost slinking behind the lingering notes of the song before, its guitars washed in relentless feedback and buzz, attempting to swallow itself Ouroboros-style. Here, Ross uses the phrase “still coming down” to describe a cleansing storm raining thunderous love — a heartening notion that there’s still room for salvation in all of his observations.
I normally wouldn’t compare Wild Pink to the Drive-By Truckers, maybe something closer to the looseness of Son Volt or the wild guitars of Drivin’ n’ Cryin — but not all twangy rock music sounds the same, Jesus. That said, there is something distinctly Mike Cooley about the first whine of Ross’ guitar in “Plates Keep Spinning”; it’s that laid-back, dry shred I’ve become accustomed to hearing right before someone starts singing about a life-altering party foul on a sticky night. “Plates Keep Spinning” isn’t far off from that; Ross compares heaven and hell to the threat of a second location being discussed at a fading party. Much like the title of the album itself, Ross’ notion about keeping the plates spinning points to this feeling of endlessness.
The album slows down around “Simple,” a kind of modern-day bank robber epic. Over a cascading pedal steel, Ross pictures a well-insured, cheeky robber just in it for the thrill. On “500 Is The New 250,” the character observed in the story is less friendly: a man under a foreboding sky pumping gas with a “fuck you, Yankee bitch” tattoo. This proximity to hatred, just one gas pump over, fills the already dense song with dread.
Still Coming Down ends on a rocker, “Relaxing, Special Interests,” with gentle lyrics about rewatching something you love. These softer lyrics don’t match the track's initial, harsher rhythm, yet as Ross sings about this comfortable familiarity, the song steadies too, becoming the loudest lullaby in the world.
In the album’s final moments, Ross opts to end things with an optimistic perspective on hypothermia and the human body, singing, “Your brain is very kind / To make you think you’re warm inside / When you’re so cold / You’re dying.” It’s here where Ross answers what still coming down means to him. Despite relentless pain or sorrow or frustration, the notion that something or someone is “still coming down” implies that you believe it will eventually stop or won’t happen. It can be about rain in a desert or a tough day, but there’s a reliable sense of brevity and relief. It’s a hopeful outlook buried deep throughout an album contemplating private embarrassments or a longing to be someone else. It’ll change soon.
Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.
