Caroline Rose goes independent and loud at the Walt Whitman Mall

Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall is the rowdiest record Caroline Rose has made and the most clipped: ten songs, nearly all of them over before you have decided how you feel about the one before. It is out on SUCK, Rose's own label, the first release there, and it moves like a record with nobody to answer to.

Rose grew up in Center Moriches on Long Island and spent two records in folk and country, America Religious in 2013 and I Will Not Be Afraid in 2014, before throwing the format out for Loner in 2018: synths, jokes, songs allowed to be funny. Superstar followed in 2020 with a storyline attached, and The Art of Forgetting in 2023 pulled the volume down and sat with grief. Then year of the slug in 2025, Garageband recordings sold only through Bandcamp. One of those songs survives into this record, at the very end of it.

John Congleton produced it, and the distance from the Garageband material is the first thing you notice. The title carries two places at once: the Long Island shopping center that borrowed Walt Whitman's name and has since rebranded as Walt Whitman Shops, and a placard Rose saw in West Texas. "It was a non-violent way of taming a horse, and that was a new mentality," Rose said of the word. The record applies the second idea to the first: tenderness aimed at something that was never asked to be tame.

Ten tracks, no interludes, and the order agrees: "Yip Yip Yow" opens it, "Chow Mein" follows with a title that belongs on a menu board above a counter, and "Cement Head" gets in and out. Congleton adds weight without taking out the immediacy. What holds the whole thing together is subject matter as much as volume: this is a guitar record about American errands, box stores, fast food, driving around because there is nowhere to be and no money to be there with.

"Notes to Teenage Self" is the strongest argument on the first side, and the longest song here: the kid in a small town with no culture, the adult who left and cannot stop driving past it. "Conversation with Shiv (The Liquid K Song)" goes to an outlet mall, the correct location for this record to have a conversation in. "Valery (Please Don't Be Mad At Me)" puts the apology in brackets, which is the only place on the album where anyone asks for anything. Then "Goddamn Train" and gone.

The subject underneath all of it is upkeep: strip malls, preppers, cult mentalities, loneliness in a crowd of people buying the same things. Rose has said they hate being online, and this is what that preference sounds like, made by someone who would rather stand in a parking lot than scroll. There is real tenderness in it. The nostalgia is the thing being held up and turned over, price tag still on.

Side B moves at a different pace. "Hello Again, Jim" opens it, "Calm" arrives late with its title doing the work, and "Ride" closes the record, the song carried over from year of the slug and given a proper studio this time. Ending there is a good decision: the scrappiest thing in the catalogue promoted to the last word.

This one is for anyone who grew up off a highway exit and has complicated feelings about the food court, and for the people who liked Loner's jokes more than The Art of Forgetting's long grief. Anyone who wants the slow burn back should look elsewhere. Nothing here holds still long enough to burn.

The cost of that speed is a middle that blurs. "Goddamn Train" is the clearest case: a great title, one hundred and fifty-seven seconds, and a hook you are still waiting for when the next track starts. Give it another two minutes and it might be the best thing here. Instead it is a good idea that got away, and the record is one song short of the run it was building.

That is one complaint against a record that knows what it is doing. Rose took the operation back, handed it to Congleton, and came out with ten short songs about malls, boredom and buying something to feel better. It earns a 4. It is loud, specific and funny, and it is over before you are ready.

Hear it